The Day of Battle (86 page)

The warming weather also brought hope to badly wounded boys whose cases would have been hopeless just a few months earlier. “We seem to be having phenomenal success with a new drug called penicillin,” wrote Lawrence D. Collins, a physician in the 56th Evacuation Hospital. Gas gangrene had killed two of every three soldiers afflicted in Italy; now the rates plummeted. “We’ve snatched them right out of the grave,” Dr. Collins told his diary. “We’re pleased, the survivors are pleased.” Less pleased were wounded German prisoners, “upon whom we’re not allowed
to use penicillin that is in short supply,” Collins noted. “No one doubts that war is hell.”

The new season stirred the dull roots. Lilacs and violets blossomed even in the dead country. A 45th Division soldier told his family in April that he had just eaten fresh eggs for the first time in five months. “Maybe,” he surmised, “they are getting us fat for the kill.” Maybe so. If Anzio remained “the largest self-supporting prisoner-of-war camp in the world,” as Axis Sally insisted in her nightly broadcasts, every soldier at the beachhead sensed a change in the air.

The advancing season also sharpened their loneliness and made them long, as Truscott did, for those redbuds and dogwoods, for children’s laughter and for baseball played with dugouts instead of slit trenches. To his son John and daughter Anne, now twelve and seven, Jack Toffey wrote, “Next to missing you all terribly I think that big league ball is the one great void in my life.”

There was only one way home. The greening breast of the Colli Laziali loomed above the hazy coastal plain, beckoning and enchanted. The hours ticked toward a more fateful hour, inexorable if still unknown. Soon they would leave this pestilential plot, this woe, this kettle of grief. None would leave it unchanged. “Anzio,” one officer wrote, “was the place where many of us ceased to be young.”

“Put the Fear of God into Them”

H
IGH
above the mud and the misery, far from the house-blowers and the pickers-off, one phase of the Allied war had long been won. The Mediterranean Allied Air Forces owned the skies with a swaggering hegemony comparable to Allied naval dominion of the high seas. Ira Eaker’s legions now included 13,000 aircraft and 300,000 troops, although several thousand of those planes, notably in the RAF’s Middle East squadrons, were “non-operational.” The 8,000 or so that
could
fly had reduced the Luftwaffe to hit-and-run niggling. Barely 500 German planes now stole from bases in southern France and northern Italy. Antiaircraft defenses against Allied raids were also puny, given the crying need to defend the Fatherland and the Eastern Front; of 4,300 German flak batteries, only 260 were deployed in Italy, along with just 14 of 470 searchlight batteries.

By contrast, Hitler’s robust defense of central Europe had made the Allied strategic bombardment of German cities and war industries a protracted death struggle at thirty thousand feet. The sanguinary vision of
pummeling the Reich from two directions—with Fifteenth Air Force in Italy complementing Eighth Air Force and British Bomber Command in England—was only now showing unambiguous promise. Although a crewman flying from Italy listed in his diary all the countries he had bombed—Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia—the contributions from Fifteenth Air Force during the winter had been curtailed by impenetrable clouds crowning the Alps, unexpectedly nasty Italian weather, fighter escort shortages, and growing pains. As late as March 1944, Eaker was still describing the Fifteenth as “a pretty disorganized mob.”

Losses in the fall of 1943 at deathtraps like Regensburg and Schweinfurt had been so appalling that the Allies temporarily lost air superiority over much of Germany. Still, by November the fate of forty-one German cities could be reduced by Bomber Command to a single sheet of paper, starting with Berlin: “480 acres of housing devastation and great industrial damage has already been caused so that Berlin is relatively as badly hit as London.” Ruination elsewhere ranged from Hanover (“largely destroyed”) to Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Munich (“seriously damaged”). Entire regions were reduced to a fatal phrase: “the Saar—small coal and steel towns to be mopped up.” A memo from Hap Arnold, also in November, compared the bomb damage at Coventry in central England (120 of 1,922 acres devastated) with that at Hamburg (6,220 of 8,382 acres) and Cologne (1,785 of 3,320 acres). And they had only begun. “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” Churchill wondered aloud. Later the prime minister, who had ardently pressed for some of the most ruinous raids, would voice regret “that the human race ever learned to fly.”

As the war’s fifth winter ended, the Combined Bomber Offensive was well along in dropping more than a million tons of explosives on German targets, which would kill or wound over a million civilians and destroy almost four million dwellings. American commanders belatedly realized that despite the hundreds of .50-caliber machine guns bristling from B-17 Flying Fortress formations, long-range fighters were needed to escort the bombers deep into the Reich. That need had been answered with the swarming arrival in early 1944 of P-51 Mustangs, which by March had a range of 850 miles, well beyond Berlin; truculent P-51s dropping their wing tanks to meet oncoming Luftwaffe fighters were likened to “barroom brawlers stripping off their coats.” American pilots were ordered “to pursue the Hun until he was destroyed. Put the fear of God into them.”

In late February, a long-delayed bombing offensive code-named
ARGUMENT
attacked almost two hundred industrial and military targets, from
aircraft factories to rubber plants. Nearly 4,000 bombers from Britain and Italy struck for days on end in a relentless bashing soon known as Big Week. Eighth Air Force dropped almost as much bomb tonnage in six days as it had during its first year in combat. Allied losses were bitter: 226 bombers, 28 fighters, and 2,600 crewmen. Hopes of crippling Germany’s aircraft industry fell short; more Luftwaffe planes rolled from German plants in 1944 than in any other year of the war, although at the expense of bomber production. Factories dispersed underground and into remote forests. Yet the blow was severe. The Luftwaffe in February lost more than one-third of its single-engine fighters and nearly one-fifth of its fighter pilots. The latter loss was especially grievous; the combat career of a new German pilot now lasted, on average, less than a month.

The weight of metal had begun to “un-gear the German war economy,” in Eaker’s phrase. Daylight bombing by the Yanks and night bombing by the Brits finally achieved the synergy that air theorists had promised for more than a year. With better weather, Allied heavy bombers in April dumped on average two tons of high explosives on German targets every minute of every day. The Luftwaffe would become almost as ineffectual in central Europe as it already was in the Mediterranean. German synthetic oil facilities, the Achilles’ heel of Hitler’s war machine, were now clearly within range and attacks began in earnest in mid-May.

Even so, the hard winter for airmen yielded to a hard spring. Allied air forces flying from England lost twenty bombers a day in March; another three thousand Eighth Air Force bombers were damaged that month. Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The Army Air Forces hardly helped their reputation for precision when they repeatedly bombed Switzerland. One pummeling, on April 1, left a hundred casualties in the town of Schaffhausen.

Losses remained dreadful from flak that was thicker than ever. Only one in four Eighth Air Force bomber crews flying in early 1944 could expect to complete the minimum quota of twenty-five missions required for reassignment to the United States; those not dead or missing would be undone by accidents, fatigue, or other misadventures. Bomber Command casualties were comparable to those of British infantrymen in World War I. Here was a pretty irony: airpower, which was supposed to preserve Allied ground forces from another Western Front abattoir, simply supplemented the butchery. A B-17 pilot described one harrowing mission:

“When I fly a mission, I’m scared,” John Muirhead told a friend. “When I’m not flying, I’m bored. When they get killed, I’m glad it’s not me.” Crewmen sang a parody of the theme song from
Casablanca:
“You must remember this / The flak can’t always miss / Somebody’s gotta die.” Accidents alone killed 13,000 U.S. airmen; by war’s end, 140,000 Allied crewmen would be dead. “On my last four raids I have been hit three times,” a flier in the 17th Bomb Group wrote home in late February. “The flak was so thick I couldn’t see the planes in front of me, and that’s no lie.” Many fuselages were quilted with the aluminum patches used to repair bullet holes and flak perforations. A B-25 bombardier in a letter home described “the enlarged pupil, the quickened breath, the dry mouth…. It is a terrible responsibility not to hit a hospital.”

Propeller turbulence, faulty electrical suits—temperatures in unheated bombers could reach -60 degrees Fahrenheit—and anoxia from defective oxygen masks all added to the risk. Enemy fighters modified their tactics to break through bomber defenses; Allied airmen were warned about Luftwaffe attack profiles dubbed the “Sisters’ Act,” the “Twin-Engine Tailpecker,” and the “Hun in the Sun.” A flight leader’s momentary lapse could have catastrophic consequences. One squadron commander, a Hollywood actor named Jimmy Stewart, later said, “I didn’t pray for myself. I just prayed that I wouldn’t make a mistake.”

In the Mediterranean the Air Force steadily increased mission quotas, especially for medium bombers, whose sorties tended to be shorter and less hazardous than the heavies, at least in theory. In February the “fixed tour” was abolished altogether in favor of “a variable one subject to local conditions.” Airmen now wore T-shirts that read, “Fly ’til I die.”

Among those affected by the ever spiraling quotas was a twenty-one-year-old bombardier from Brooklyn, whose B-25 bomber group moved to Corsica with new airplanes in April after being violently evicted from Vesuvius airfield by the volcano’s eruption. Lieutenant Joseph Heller would fly sixty sorties over Italy and southern France, refracting his experiences through the story of an iconic B-25 bombardier named John Yossarian in the greatest novel to emerge from the war,
Catch-22.

“They were trying to kill me, and I wanted to go home. That they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation,” Heller later wrote in a memoir. “They were trying to kill
me….
I began crossing my fingers each time we took off and saying in silence a little prayer. It was my sneaky ritual.”

Command of the Italian skies emboldened Allied airmen to aver that they could extend their dominion to the ground. An interdiction campaign that severed enemy logistical lines in central Italy would force “a German withdrawal made necessary by his inadequate supply,” Eaker wrote Hap Arnold in early April. Starving Kesselring’s armies of food, fuel, and ammunition might even make a “ground offensive unnecessary,” opening the road to Rome while saving countless lives. The campaign would be code-named
STRANGLE
.

Extravagant claims for airpower’s efficacy had been made before, at Messina, Salerno, and Anzio, and at Cassino, twice; Eaker had even promised Truscott that his pilots would silence Anzio Annie.
STRANGLE
was the boldest assertion yet “of the airmen’s claim to be able to win the land battle for the soldiers,” as W.G.F. Jackson wrote. Italy seemed an ideal laboratory for air interdiction, given the narrowness of the peninsula, the long supply lines from Germany, and the steep terrain, which canalized rail tracks through narrow defiles with many bridges and tunnels.

Much of the thinking about how best to hurt the Germans from on high had been entrusted to a South African–born anatomist and primate specialist named Solly Zuckerman, who had moved beyond studies such as
The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes
to consider the pernicious effect of bombs falling on human beings. A Churchill favorite whose friends before the war included Evelyn Waugh, Lillian Hellman, and the musical Gershwins, Zuckerman with his logarithms and probabilities had loomed large in AFHQ’s bombardment planning since before the invasion of Sicily. In a report endorsed by the British Air Ministry in late 1943, he posited that the best way to “isolate the battlefield” in southern Italy was through the relentless bombardment of rail marshaling yards, especially those with big repair shops. Zuckerman’s influence had led to a keen focus in the last several months on such rail center bottlenecks in central and northern Italy.

But Zuckerman had decamped to join Eisenhower in London, and at Caserta a backlash developed against his theology. Intelligence analysts noted that since the capture of Naples more than eight thousand tons of bombs had fallen on Italian marshaling yards “without critically weakening the enemy supply position.” The Italian rail system under German control included at least four dozen major marshaling yards, and a hundred
other centers with ten or more tracks; all were hard to cut and easy to either fix or circumvent. Kesselring’s divisions on the Cassino, Anzio, and Adriatic fronts needed an estimated four thousand tons of supplies each day, hauled on fifteen trains that used less than a tenth of the Italian rail capacity. Germany also had so many locomotives—63,000 in all of Europe—that it “could have afforded to discard at the end of each haul the locomotives needed for the fifteen trains,” according to Allied intelligence.