The Day of Battle (85 page)

“This beachhead is the craziest place I have ever seen,” Lieutenant William J. Segan, a signal officer, wrote to his brother in New Jersey. “The boys have their own private horses, chickens, livestock, bicycles, and everything else that the civilians left.” Near Borgo Sabatino, soldiers hitched mule to plow and planted fields of cabbage and potatoes. “I can’t do a thing with those sons of bitches,” a 1st Special Service Force officer complained. “They patrol all night and they farm all day.” Other soldiers angled for eels in the Astura River, or hunted pheasant and rabbit with shotguns used to guard German prisoners. After finding that grenade fishing ruined the sashimi, Japanese-American troops in the 100th Battalion seined with mosquito netting and gathered watercress garnishes from the Mussolini Canal.

Troops played baseball on improvised diamonds, using folded T-shirts for bases and slit trenches for dugouts. Daredevil water-skiers slalomed
across the Tyrrhenian Sea behind a DUKW. A private who called himself the Baron ambled around the beachhead in a tuxedo, performing magic shows with Chinese rings and a pet duck. Bike steeplechases, lizard races, sniper contests, and husbandry—including cattle-breeding experiments—kept the men busy while they waited for their fates to unfold. The Anzio Derby, organized by a former Baltimore handicapper now wearing sergeant’s stripes, was run over a shell-pocked course laid out with tent pegs and engineer tape. As each steed clopped from the vineyard paddock, a bugler blew the call to the post. A quartermaster bay named Six-by-Six beat a half dozen other nags and a jackass named George, surmounted by a 240-pound jockey from Brooklyn; judges ruled that in future races all steeds must outweigh their riders. Pretty nurses awarded the purse, a two-pound box of chocolates.

More than thirty Anzonian newspapers covered such activities; the
Beachhead Bugle
also printed travel notes, including a roster of departing reporters that began: “The following rats deserted the sinking ship yesterday…” No sport aroused greater passion than beetle racing, in which insects—stabled in jam jars and daubed with racing colors—were dropped in the center of a six-foot circle; the first to reach the perimeter was declared the winner. Thousands of dollars were wagered on big sweepstakes, and it was said that shady bookmakers fixed one race by purchasing the favorite and stomping it to death.

Alcohol provided some consolation to losing bettors, as well as “catacomb courage” to the frightened and lonely. Distilleries built from fuel cans and tubing salvaged from aircraft wreckage produced “gasoline,” a potent hooch flavored with pineapple juice. Bootleggers from the 133rd Infantry blended fifty pounds of fermented raisins and a dash of vanilla to make “Plastered in Paris,” while others preferred fermented fig bars from Army rations. “The still blew up,” a corporal wrote in his diary, “but they got some good liquor while it lasted.” In April the first authorized beer arrived at the beachhead, roughly a pint per man each fortnight, brewed in Naples under specifications provided by Budweiser. To prevent pilferage, sutlers rolled the kegs ashore and stored them under guard behind barbed wire.

Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey’s change-of-command party featured whiskey sours made from C-ration lemon powder and medicinal alcohol. Having led an infantry battalion in combat with little respite since
TORCH
in November 1942, Toffey in mid-March left his 2nd Battalion of the 15th Infantry to become executive officer—second in command—of the 7th Infantry, another 3rd Division regiment that also had bivouacked at the
beachhead. Truscott personally ordered the change to give Toffey a bit of relief while allowing a larger unit to benefit from his battle expertise.

“There are days and other days in this game—some good—some bad,” he wrote Helen in Columbus. “All in all it is a terrific strain on health, mind & body…. I am somewhat easier in the mind than I was and more confident of our ability to kick hell out of this damn Hun.” He apologized for letters that are “dumb, dull and stupid—but perhaps I’m getting that way.” To his old friend George Biddle he confessed, “Efficiency in general and combat efficiency in particular suffer when individuals remain too long and too constantly under the gun.” In joining the 7th Infantry, he had come full circle: his father had served as the regimental adjutant at Fort Wayne, Michigan, when Jack was born in August 1907. After moving into a tiny subterranean trailer outside Nettuno, with light provided by a jeep battery and Helen’s photo hung on the wall, Toffey wrote, “I have seen about enough of Italy and enough of war…. I live in a cave-like place which is damp and makes me stoop over. I’m full of kinks and aches as a result.”

Only a few miles from the beetle races and volleyball tournaments, the dead country remained as dangerous and forbidding as any battle zone in Italy. “For four months no man dared stand upright by day,” wrote the BBC reporter Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. Unable to bury the dead, soldiers in the foremost foxholes crawled out at night to sprinkle creosote on the ripening corpses; others swapped shouted insults with the enemy. “Roosevelt is a Jew” would be answered with “Hitler is a bastard.” Tommies trapped rats in empty sandbags and slung them into German observation posts. Private First Class Robert W. Komer described watching no-man’s-land through field glasses: “Here a few helmeted heads peeping cautiously from a foxhole, there a couple of tanks snuggled against the side of a shattered house…. A squad of infantrymen straggled by across the field toward their positions, an ambulance came tearing down the road, litter bearers picked their way carefully among the ditches and the holes.”

No field glasses could reveal how badly the Germans at Anzio had been bruised and bled. From 133,000 men on March 9, the Fourteenth Army in the next six weeks would shrink, through battle losses and transfers to the Cassino front, by 43,000 men, 170 guns, and 125 tanks, while Allied strength steadily grew. Kesselring condemned the “lack of aggressiveness by both officers and men,” and Berlin insisted that “we must continue the attack in the Nettuno sector in order to keep the initiative.” General Mackensen replied angrily that “German divisions are battle weary,” with some reduced to three thousand men or less. For every German shell fired, the Allies now answered with fifteen—“quantities hitherto hardly imaginable,” complained one German commander, who also lamented the “enormous
blast and gouge effect” of naval gunfire. Even Sherman tanks joined the barrages, their barrels elevated with logs stacked beneath the tracks. Crews slammed another shell into the breech and sang out, “Call the roll, Kesselring. Here we come.”

To be sure, the biggest German guns remained terrifying. A pair of seventy-foot barrels, called Robert and Leopold by the Germans but known variously to the Allies as Anzio Annie or Whistling Pete, each fired a six-hundred-pound shell as far as thirty-eight miles. Near misses in the anchorage raised water spouts two hundred feet high; even duds ashore burrowed fifty feet into the earth. Mounted on rail flatcars, the guns after firing a half dozen shells withdrew into a tunnel two miles from Ciampino. Despite muzzle flashes brighter than any dragon’s fire, Allied pilots and gunnery observers never pinpointed the battery. Perhaps the only saving grace was a shortage of shells: Robert and Leopold by the end of April would together throw just 523 rounds.

Yet it was the close fight, at distances from bayonet length to potshot range, that remained most sinister and most intimate. Toffey organized three “battle patrols” of fifty ruthless men each, ensured that they got regular hot meals and dry clothing, then sent them out to wreak havoc. Pulling a wicked blade from his leggings, one soldier slashed at the air. “My friends back home gave me this knife,” he said. “I’m saving it to use on Hitler when I see him.” Snipers, known in the 7th Infantry as “pickers-off,” sprayed themselves with camouflage paint, shielding their eyes with scraps of cardboard, then lay motionless for hours in hopes of one clean shot.

“The march up is something that no one likes,” a soldier told his diary on April 1. “If you stumble into each other, the procedure is to blast away for a short time and then take off in a hurry.” Patrols navigated in the dark by using various corpses as landmarks—“just skeletons in clothes.” Scouts sniffed the air for the telltale scents of tobacco and fresh-turned earth. Audie Murphy earned the first of his many valor decorations for leading a patrol near Cisterna to fire an immobilized panzer with a grenade through the hatch. Like most of his comrades, he distrusted bravado—“All the heroes I know are dead,” he later said—but he had concluded that “audacity is a tactical weapon. Nine times out of ten it will throw the enemy off-balance and confuse him.”

Propaganda tried to do the same. Leaflets covered the beachhead like Vesuvian ash. More than four billion Allied leaflets would be printed in the Mediterranean, the equivalent of four thousand truckloads; among the many variants dropped or fired at Anzio was
“Fünf Minuten Englisch,”
a glossary of handy phrases for Germans contemplating surrender, such as “Where is the hot water?” and “Some more coffee, please.” German propagandists replied
with their own paper barrages. The “Abe Levy” series showed a Jewish contractor at home molesting the girlfriend of a wounded soldier; another leaflet, aimed at British units, showed a scantily clad Englishwoman pulling on her stockings as a GI reknotted his tie. “What goes on at home whilst you are away?” the caption asked. “No woman can resist such handsome brutes.” As one Tommy observed, “Jerry has become very cheeky.”

Enemies who could not be talked from their works must be winkled out. Night after night, “house-blowing” patrols whittled away the beachhead skyline between the opposing armies: tanks, mortars, and 8-inch howitzers pulverized the upper floors of suspected strongpoints while riflemen screened by thick smoke splashed across the polders to exterminate any survivors. On the foreheads of dead Germans, Forcemen left calling card stickers with a spearhead insignia and a warning that
das dicke Ende kommt noch:
the worst is yet to come. Every haystack, every manure bin, every outdoor oven—anything that could hide an enemy soldier with a machine pistol—came under seething fire. “Houses 5 and 6 are in our possession,” reported a battalion commander after suffering fifty-three casualties in one nameless skirmish. “Our front line is now 500 yards closer to Rome. We turn our faces grimly toward Houses 7, 8, 9.”

In this “kettle of grief,” as one Anzonian called it, death seemed not just capricious but cruel and willful: a random shell killed six men watching a movie; another killed eight more at supper; a bomb on a combat engineer bivouac killed twenty-one; two died when an artillery shell pierced their Piper Grasshopper a thousand feet up. A German mortar round through a barn roof left a corporal “holding his face together with his hand,” a witness reported. A Forceman whose leg was blown off rode to the aid station atop a tank. “Hey, doc,” he yelled to the battalion surgeon, “you got an extra foot around this place?”

All frayed, some broke. “Yesterday made 60 days of hell on this blessed beachhead,” wrote a soldier in the 15th Infantry. “The fact that it cannot last forever seems to be the only thing that keeps us going.” After weeks in the line, “foxhole-itis” made even pugnacious sergeants reluctant to leave their burrows. “All the boys who never prayed before now pray with devotion, and they cry when they are faced with death,” a soldier in the 6th Armored Infantry reported. The Beachhead Army comprised “common ordinary men in whom the instinct of self-preservation is very strong,” the 3rd Division headquarters advised new platoon leaders. By late March, an entire hospital ward was filled with what the Army labeled S.I.W.—self-inflicted wounds—usually a bullet to the heel or toe. One battalion commander in the 3rd Division kept a bottle of tranquilizers for officers who seemed especially jittery, and doctors formed the Anzio Beachhead Psychiatry Society to
discuss intriguing “neuro-psychiatric” cases. “I saw him as they led him past my foxhole,” a young soldier in the 179th Infantry wrote of one comrade, “a pathetic, shaking and stumbling figure.”

All frayed, yet many also grew flinty and remorseless, as victorious armies must. “This war has become a very personal affair to lots of us here in the beachhead,” one Forceman wrote. An American Indian in the 45th Division was said to have collected a sheaf of German scalps; comrades nauseated by the odor forced him to stop. In a letter to his family in New Haven, a soldier wrote in April that his friend Henry had shot a German climbing over a fence. The dead man lay on the wire “all day long. About once every hour Henry would shoot him again just for the hell of it.” Nocturnal pleas for
Mutter
mingled with cries for Mama from those trapped and mewing in the dead country. “The wounded struggle so hard to tell us so much,” said one GI. But a captured German paratrooper surmised that those “who simply refused to die and screamed and screamed were the ones who changed the soldiers’ reactions from pity to hatred as the night progressed.” When a pathetic voice repeatedly called in English, “My name is Müller. I am wounded,” a GI heaved a grenade and muttered, “What’s your name now, you sonofabitch?”

The days warmed, the season advanced. Crews in the 1st Armored Division painted their tanks a darker, vernal green. Reforestation teams in early April began camouflaging craters and defoliated patches for concealment along the beachhead perimeter. Malaria returned, but much had been learned from the Sicilian debacle. Aware that “mosquitoes alone could accomplish what the German counterattacks had failed to achieve,” Truscott in April sent two thousand VI Corps soldiers to “anti-malaria training.” The consumption of Atabrine tablets was enforced by watchful sergeants. “Dusting patrols” sprayed more than one hundred miles of streams and ditches with DDT and kerosene, while repairing pumps, dikes, and canal banks. Soldiers complained that if they spilled a cup of water someone either drained the puddle or sprayed it. Barely two thousand malaria cases would be reported in June among Fifth Army troops, a tiny fraction of the previous summer’s epidemic.