The Day of Battle (94 page)

Here was the chance Alexander had long awaited, a chance for redemption, for exculpation, for annihilation. Seven divisions in the Beachhead Army would fall on the enemy’s flank, like a dagger in the ribs. The hour was ripe, at last.

A Fifth Army Show

M
ARK
Clark shifted his command post from Caserta to Anzio on Monday, May 22, arriving at noon in a little L-5 single-engine plane
with a wingspan hardly bigger than his own. At ten
P.M
., after a late supper in the Borghese villa, he strode through the cellar command post to a conference room, led by a beefy colonel who barked, “’Ten-
shun
!” Several dozen correspondents, slouching on benches beneath the naked bulbs, came to their feet in various attitudes of resentment. “Sit down, gentlemen,” Clark said. He cut the air with the flat of his hand.

For half an hour, unhurried and precise, he explained his attack plan in detail, occasionally pointing to the enormous map tacked like a pelt to the wall behind him. The artillery would open fire in less than eight hours, a thousand guns. General Truscott’s VI Corps had grown to an army within Fifth Army: seven divisions plus Brigadier General Robert Frederick’s 1st Special Service Force. The host included the U.S. 36th Infantry Division, which had secretly arrived by sea over the last four days as part of General Alex’s plan “to dribble them in unseen.” Clockwise around the beachhead perimeter, the attacking force included the British 5th and 1st Divisions on the left, then the U.S. 45th Infantry, the 1st Armored—with a regiment from the 34th Infantry—and the 3rd Infantry Divisions. The Forcemen protected the right flank, while the 36th and the bulk of the 34th remained in reserve. Opposing this juggernaut, Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army comprised five and a half divisions.

Under Operation
BUFFALO
, “the main impetus of our attack” would be to seize Cisterna, Clark continued, no easy task since the town had been heavily fortified after the Rangers’ disastrous assault in January. The spearhead would then stab northeast through Cori to cut Highway 6 at Valmontone, “with the ultimate objective of destroying as many Germans as possible.” He intended to “bottle up the main body of the German army from the Cassino front,” Clark said. The attack did not “have as its purpose to capture Rome,” but he intended to keep “a flexible mind.” After a glance at the map he seemed to correct himself. “We’re going to take Rome,” he said.

As the correspondents shuffled from the cellar, staff officers confided that the press could assure the public that General Clark was “in personal command.” To drive home the point, Clark radioed Gruenther at Caserta. “There is no restriction placed on [disclosing] my whereabouts,” he advised his chief of staff. “You tear anybody to pieces who attempts to change this.” Moreover, Gruenther was to ensure that any communiqué announcing the attack “is properly worded and that it is a Fifth Army show. I do not want the first announcement of this to come out to the effect that Alexander’s troops have attacked from the bridgehead.”

If Clark had disclosed much of his plan, he also kept much to himself. Internecine bickering over the timing and direction of the attack had only
intensified. Alexander remained adamant that once the Beachhead Army stood athwart Highway 6 at Valmontone, “fast, mobile patrols” could cut other German escape routes to the east. Clark just as vigorously insisted that trapping Tenth Army “couldn’t be done”; he also noted that under
BUFFALO
the enemy would still occupy the Colli Laziali, with the usual high-ground advantages.

A face-to-face meeting at Caserta on May 20 had failed to resolve their differences. Alexander ordered the beachhead attack for the night of May 21, evidently on the misapprehension that the Hitler Line had been breached by Eighth Army at Aquino. When Clark protested, Alexander agreed to hang fire until the morning of the twenty-third; he also would simultaneously renew Leese’s attack in the Liri Valley, while hoping to “conserve losses” in the battle-weary Eighth Army.

Clark suspected double-dealing. “I am convinced that Eighth Army will hold their attack and let the French carry the ball for them as they have done so far in this battle,” he told his diary. “All their actions are always dictated by their desire to save manpower and let someone else do it.”

Precisely what Clark intended may not have been evident even to him. Later he would acknowledge telling himself, “Hell, we shouldn’t even be thinking about Rome. All we should be thinking about is killing Germans.” Capturing the capital would be glorious to be sure, an honor “we felt that we more than deserved.” Still, orders were orders, and Alexander’s were explicit. Clark had radioed Truscott before leaving Caserta: “Operation
BUFFALO
will be launched at 0630 hours on May 23rd.”

Yet he had also sent the corps commander a private message. As the attack unspooled, Truscott should be prepared to consider “an alternative plan,” Clark wrote. “Regrouping would take place and [a] new attack launched northwest from Cisterna area.” Rather than slashing east toward Valmontone, most of the Beachhead Army could swing west of the Colli Laziali on the shortest route to Rome, the “great prize.” As Clark had told the reporters, a good commander should always keep a flexible mind.

Smoke generators fogged the front from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Mussolini Canal. Third Division soldiers, who would carry the main attack against Cisterna, had marched forward from their wooded bivouacs, battalion by battalion tramping past a brass band that crashed through the division anthem as it had when they embarked for Anzio four months earlier:

Light rain had fallen earlier in the evening, but the skies cleared in the small hours. Stars twinkled through the artificial haze before a gray overcast louver again slid over the beachhead from the sea. Soldiers fumbled for a final time with their web gear; many carried lengths of parachute cord, said to make superior tourniquets. A nineteen-year-old sergeant in the 15th Infantry, after receiving no mail from home for six weeks, had been handed forty letters by the company clerk late Monday night; he tucked the envelopes into his combat pack, wondering if he would live long enough to open them. From the radio in a 1st Armored Division tank drifted the improbable strains of
Oklahoma!
As dawn’s apricot glow brightened the eastern sky, an Old Ironsides lieutenant read aloud from Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, then exclaimed, “There’s nothing ever new in war!”

Expectation, anxiety, release—all fluttered across the front like bats looking to roost. Clark had snatched a few hours’ rest on a metal cot; to escape the damp air of the Borghese cellar, he slept upstairs in a high-ceilinged salon with gilded chandeliers and enormous oils on the walls. After rising at four
A.M
. and wolfing down breakfast, he climbed into his jeep for the drive from Nettuno to the front. At 5:30, just as the sun started to peep over the horizon, he joined Truscott in a camouflaged observation post at Conca, where in January they had watched in misery as Darby’s Rangers and the 3rd Division were impaled on Cisterna’s defenses. Neither man said much, each lost in his thoughts.

With a thunderous roar the barrage opened precisely at 5:45
A.M
.: howitzers, mortars, tanks—every tube with a powder charge. “They can hear this in Rome, maybe,” one soldier shouted. Shock waves from the cannonade shimmered across the sky like heat rising off blacktop. Clouds of dust blanketed the battlefield, brilliantly lighted from within by bursting shells. Sixty fighter-bombers swept across the front, leaving charred, battered Cisterna more charred and more battered.

Then, at 6:30, the riflemen spilled over the top, no longer singing, fury in their eyes, and fear too, the deep roar of artillery now punctuated with the
pop! pop! pop!
of rifle fire and the keening of a thousand machine guns. On a five-mile front, three regiments abreast, the 3rd Division threw itself against four German battalions entrenched in platoon-sized redoubts around Cisterna, three to five hundred yards apart, each encrusted with mines, barbed wire, and automatic weapons. A half mile east of Isola Bella, hard by the Rangers’ last-stand field, Company L from the 15th Infantry quickly lost 140 of 180 men. “The man in front of me was struck by a bullet,” a sergeant in I Company wrote. “I rolled him over and saw his eyes were pulled up and set.”

Farther east, Company K of the 30th Infantry reported a dozen men left standing; German fire swept the fields like a sickle, leaving both the dead and the cut grass in windrows. On the right, Company E of the 15th fixed bayonets and in a shrieking charge swarmed through a woody grove, killing fifteen Germans and capturing eighty. Still, the line had hardly gained a quarter mile. “It is going too slow,” Major General O’Daniel, the division commander, complained at eight
A.M
. “Throw everything you have at them.” Jack Toffey and the 7th Infantry had been given the hardest nut to crack, in the center of the assault, but when a staff officer reported that two lead companies were pinned down, O’Daniel replied, “We have no such words in our vocabulary now.”

Just past noon, five more Sherman tanks trundled into the fight, each towing an O’Daniel brainstorm: “battle sleds,” fabricated in great secrecy from torpedo tubes sawed in half lengthwise, with steel runners welded to the bottom. Eight feet long, two feet wide, and just deep enough to carry a prostrate, nervous soldier, the sleds were joined end to end, six to a train, with each tank dragging two trains. Ditches and mines proved their undoing. Hardly had sixty sleds slid onto the stage than they could slide no farther; the riders spilled out, grateful to take their chances dismounted.

Yard by bloody yard, the advance drew nearer Cisterna. By day’s end, beneath spattering rain, 3rd Division soldiers would close within six hundred yards of the town, and a mile nearer Rome than they had been at dawn. But none had severed Highway 7 or the parallel rail embankment, and casualties had been outlandish: one thousand killed, wounded, or missing, the division’s most sanguinary day during World War II thus far, and among the costliest for any U.S. Army division on any day in the war. Damaged boys outnumbered the litter bearers available to carry them away. Seeing carnage all about, a young private lamented, “Must I be knocked off before I have had a woman?”

Truscott’s flanks found hard fighting as well. On the right, Frederick’s Forcemen scampered across Highway 7 below Cisterna only to retreat pell-mell under lashing fire from Tigers seemingly impervious to antitank rounds. “All hell has broken through up here,” a staff officer radioed Truscott. “The Germans have unleashed everything.” On the far left, British troops held their ground but no more in an attack designed mostly as a diversion. The 45th Division waded through thigh-high wheat, sidestepping skeletons in moldering field gray, until machine-gun cross fire sent the men to ground. German gunners traced the trails carved through the grain by low-crawling GIs, and the dull thud of bullets hitting home carried across the golden fields. A counterattack by more than a dozen
Tigers flayed one battalion caught in the open and chewed into another before artillery fire shooed them off.

By nightfall the 45th reported 458 casualties and aid stations were so taxed that wounded soldiers were forced to share cots. “The fellow in the bed next to me had been hit in the back with shrapnel and kept begging the doctors to let him die,” one artilleryman later recalled. A captain who had stepped on a mine studied the stump where his foot had been and reflected, “That’s the one that was always getting cold anyway.”

The day’s last best hope fell to the 1st Armored Division, attacking with 232 tanks on a three-mile front east of Cisterna. “Whether or not we can get our tanks through remains a question. I expect to lose heavily,” Ernie Harmon had written a friend a week earlier. Those losses, he warned, could include one hundred tanks in the first half hour. Harmon’s dark mood hardly brightened when his right wing—Combat Command B—blundered into a poorly marked American minefield sown during the winter’s fighting. Thirty Shermans soon sat immobilized with fractured tracks and broken bogey wheels less than a quarter mile from the start line.

On the left, however, Combat Command A used another battlefield invention to excellent effect. Before dawn, tanks had shoved into no-man’s-land a pair of four-hundred-foot “snakes”—four-inch pipe packed with several tons of explosives. While puzzled German pickets shook tin cans filled with rocks to sound the alarm, a burst of machine-gun fire detonated the pipes with “an appalling violence” that carved a smoldering channel twenty-five feet wide through the minefield. Two more snakes extended the corridor and Harmon’s tanks poured into the gap like floodwaters through a ruptured dike. Riflemen from the 135th Infantry clung to the Sherman hulls then leaped clear to round up prisoners and slaughter the diehards.

By one
P.M
. U.S. tanks had crossed the cinder brow of the rail embankment, provoking a frantic flapping of white flags, and an infantry battalion held the high ground five hundred yards to the north. Combat Command B—which had eschewed the snakes for fear that a premature detonation would alert enemy defenders—belatedly blew its own gap and sallied within main gun range of Highway 7 before laagering for the night. Infantrymen slept on their arms behind sandbags hauled forward on the tanks.