The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (454 page)

Given the need to make the Normandy landings under a nearly full moon, and on a rising tide within sixty minutes after dawn, the delay effectively pushed Overlord into the first week of June. Secrecy being as critical as logistics to Overlord’s success, Operation Bodyguard was soon born, a multifaceted campaign of radio intercepts, double agents, and false intelligence. Its stepchild, Operation Fortitude, entailed the creation of phony armies from Scotland to southeast England. The phantom armies broadcast phony radio messages that the Germans were welcome to intercept and interpret at their own risk. The ranks of the nonexistent units consisted of brigades of inflatable rubber tanks and squadrons of plywood planes, which when photographed from the air by German reconnaissance flights indicated massive troop buildups.

New Allied weapons also contributed to the cause. Major General Percy (“Hobo”) Hobart, the erratic tank genius whom Churchill had brought back into service in 1940 (over Brooke’s objections), was put in command of building specialty tanks—“swimming” tanks that could come ashore under their own power; tanks that “flailed” minefields with wildly spinning chains; and flame-throwing tanks capable of incinerating large buildings. Montgomery and Eisenhower added dimensions to Overlord not imagined by the original planners. Three days later, Eisenhower briefed the Combined Chiefs of Staff on his new plan. Even though events were now going the way Brooke had argued for, he could not bring himself to write a complimentary word about Eisenhower: “I certainly agree with his [Eisenhower’s] proposal, but it is certainly not his idea, and is one of Monty’s. Eisenhower has got absolutely no strategical outlook and is totally unfit for the post he holds.”
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Days after Montgomery argued for the cancellation of Anvil (and Eisenhower agreed to postpone it), Churchill came up with another means to reinforce Overlord. It took the form of landing three armored divisions in Bordeaux a few weeks after the start of the Normandy venture, which, according to plan, by twenty days after D-day would find Allied troops well inland. He code-named the operation Caliph, and proposed that the three divisions be moved from the Mediterranean to Morocco before being shipped around the Iberian Peninsula and into the port of Bordeaux. In Caliph, Churchill beheld a solution to a problem he anticipated: Anvil must necessarily draw down Alexander’s landing ships and troops and thereby force a halt in the springtime Italian campaign. In Churchill’s
estimation, a shift from Anvil to Caliph would both support the Normandy invasion (Eisenhower’s first priority) and improve prospects in Italy (Churchill’s theater of destiny). It would establish two distinct theaters—France and Italy/Mediterranean—under two supreme commanders (Eisenhower and Jumbo Wilson). This was an alternative far superior to the god-awful muddle that would result from two simultaneous and mutually dependent operations within close proximity, one in southern France and the other in northern Italy, where Churchill presumed Alexander would be by May. Brooke dismissed Caliph as a “wild venture.” After the British Chiefs of Staff and Churchill discussed the matter, Brooke wrote, “I think we have ridden him of this for the present.” They had, but only for the present.
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M
ore than 25,000 Allied troops, British and American, went ashore at Anzio and Nettuno on January 22. Surprise was total. The beaches were undefended; the men came ashore with ease and by noon reached the first day’s objective of driving three miles inland. This put the invasion force about forty miles north of Kesselring’s rear, and sixty miles north of the Fifth Army. That morning, Brooke enthused to his diary over bagging 172 pheasants on a one-day shooting holiday and, in reference to the surprise attained at Anzio, added, “This was a wonderful relief.”

That was the last positive diary entry Brooke would make in regard to Anzio for several months. By the next day, 15,000 more troops came ashore, along with almost four thousand vehicles (far too many, Churchill believed, and he told Alexander to make sure he landed enough men to fill his thousands of trucks). Then, instead of striking inland, the men sat static on the Anzio beaches for two days. And that was the problem. With their backs to the sea and six divisions’ worth of German reinforcements rushing from northern Italy to their front, the Allies found themselves ripe targets for the German 88s hastily dug into hillsides above and around the beach. By January 28, Churchill knew the invasion had failed. He famously described the situation a few weeks later when he told Colville and Brooke, “I thought we should fling wildcat ashore and all we got was an old stranded whale on the beach.” Churchill liked to repeat his favorite phrases for effect; this one was accurate and it captured exactly the stasis on the beaches. Even the code name, Shingle, took on a terrible irony, for it was on the seashore shingle that the army remained. The fault for that, as Churchill saw it, lay with the American commander, General John P. Lucas. He came, he saw, he consulted, and as a result, his men died. Kesselring,
in contrast, deployed his forces with precision. Yet Sir John Keegan sided with Lucas in a critical regard: “Had Lucas risked rushing at Rome the first day, his spearheads would probably have arrived, though they would have soon been crushed.”
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The idea of Italy having any sort of soft underbelly was being refuted daily sixty miles south of Anzio. The coordinating blow by Mark Clark’s Fifth Army in support of the Anzio landings had begun on January 17 when British forces attacked across the lower Garigliano River. On January 20, six thousand Americans from the 36th Texas Division tried to attack across the Rapido, swollen by winter rains, its currents deadly. The surrounding terrain was a quagmire; no roads led in or out of the area. For three days the Texans tried, and for three days they failed to take the far banks, with more than one thousand killed. It was a gruesome defeat for the Texans, the Fifth Army, and Churchill. In order to get to Anzio and the great prize—Rome—the Fifth Army had to get across the Rapido and take Monte Cassino, where the German 1st Parachute Division was now dug in on the slopes. On January 24, Clark threw the American 34th Division onto the mountain; on February 12, after almost three weeks of close combat, the Germans threw it off. The road to Rome had not been shortened by as much as a foot.
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The most formidable obstacle the Allies faced in Italy was Albert Kesselring’s Gustav Line, which began just north of the mouth of the Garigliano River on the Tyrrhenian coast. Built by the quasi-military German construction company Organization Todt, which was also rushing to complete Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Gustav Line—a man-made bifurcation of the Italian peninsula that was as formidable as a mountain range—was an extraordinary feat of engineering, a coast-to-coast concrete fortress with interlocking artillery sites, barbed wire, machine guns, and mines, behind which Kesselring deployed the thirteen divisions of his Tenth Army. In the west, the line was anchored by Monte Cassino, which overlooked Highway 6, the road to Rome. From there the line ran east over the spine of the Apennines to the mouth of the Sangro River on the Adriatic coast, where the Eighth Army was engaged in its bloodiest action of the war. Unlike the Maginot Line, the Gustav Line could not be easily outflanked, as the battle for the Liri Valley proved, hourly.

Yet, in a critical regard, Hitler’s decision to dig in and stand fast rather than to have his army slowly pull back into northern Italy played into Churchill’s hands. Hitler’s Italian forces were tied down and therefore not available to reinforce the Atlantic Wall. This result had been the goal of Churchill and Brooke from the start. They had always seen Italy as both an end in itself and a means to restrict Hitler’s ability to deploy his forces on his terms only. But Churchill had never sought stalemate; he wanted to
lure Hitler’s armies to their doom. That strategy was only half fulfilled. Hitler’s divisions in Italy would not be going to Normandy, but unless and until Alexander got his armies off the beach at Anzio and around the German flank at Cassino, the Allies would not be going to Rome. Rome was not only a great political prize but a vital military objective, for without control of the airfields near Rome, there could be no Anvil; nor of course could there be a swing by Alexander northwest to France or northeast toward the Balkans and Austria. Thus all roads led to Rome. In early February, Brooke and the British Chiefs of Staff wired Washington with the opinion that “the only thing to do is to go on fighting the war in Italy and give up any idea of a weak landing in southern France.” This was just what Churchill had anticipated two weeks earlier when he proposed Caliph, a plan Brooke considered “a wild venture.” Yet unless the Combined Chiefs came up with a better way to reinforce Overlord, Anvil would have to go forward sometime after the Normandy invasion, at the probable expense of Italian operations.
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In mid-February, Kesselring unleashed an all-out attack upon the Anzio beachhead. Had it not been for the Ultra decrypts that warned the Allies of Kesselring’s plans, Lucas and his little army would have been thrown into the sea. Alexander sacked Lucas on February 23. The men on the beachhead moved into underground warrens of muddy trenches, foxholes, and basements—and not just the infantry but the support troops, too, including mechanics, weathermen, medics, and cooks. There was no rear to move back to. Lice infested uniforms and bedrolls; malarial mosquitoes swarmed out of the marshes, which Mussolini had drained years before but the Germans had now flooded. Allied ranks were swelled by hundreds of Italian orphans who, their parents dead and their homes destroyed, wandered into the lines, as did hundreds of stray dogs and cats, which the troops adopted. German artillery and Stukas raked the beach, daily, hourly, constantly. A German bomb fell so close to the stone house where newspaperman Ernie Pyle was sleeping that the concussion tossed him out of bed and blew his cigarettes out of the pack. He gathered them up and smoked them all by lunchtime. Nearly 4,500 Allied troops never made it off the beach alive.
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A
s February went out, Hitler, who had promised retaliation for months, turned the Luftwaffe loose upon London. The Blitz was back and with a fury. The raids came like hammer strokes; smaller fleets of Heinkels came in fast and dropped more powerful bombs than in 1940. They no longer
came during the “bomber’s moon” but on the darkest of nights, guided by their navigation beams. The raiders knew not to linger over London, due to the improvements the British had made in radio-controlled anti-aircraft targeting. Bell Laboratories manufactured an electronic gun director that measured the speed, course, and altitude of aircraft, along with wind direction and muzzle velocity of the anti-aircraft shells. The final calculation determined the altitude at which the proximity fuses of the anti-aircraft shells were set to burst. All of these calculations, and the automatic aiming and firing of the guns, were performed by a component of the system that Bell called the “computer.”
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The Germans, in turn, befuddled British radar by turning Window—tinfoil streamers—against Britain, as the British had done over Hamburg. London’s children called the foil streamers “flutterers” and danced around trees laden with them, like Maypoles, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes. But other than the children, no one enjoyed the onslaught (with the exception perhaps of one old man, his tin hat always at the ready). When the sirens wailed, Churchill once again took himself off, as he had during the 1940 Blitz, to Hyde Park now, where Mary’s AA battery produced the music of the night. Once again Londoners had to shovel glass from gutters; once again crowds lined up at shelters before sundown. The windows were again blown out of No. 10. Londoners demeaned the attacks as the “Baby Blitz.” But the bombers were getting through. “The glow of fires in the sky shows the damage was widespread,” Colville wrote after one raid. “London seems disturbed by the raids, and less ebullient than in 1940–41.”
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By mid-February the battle for the Gustav Line was faring no better than that for Anzio. A second attack on Monte Cassino, by the New Zealanders, was planned for February 16. The ferocity of the battle for the town of Cassino and the monastery above it led some in the English clergy to express fears that Rome, too, would be subject to destruction, a worry Mollie Panter-Downes downplayed in a February 13 column in
The New Yorker,
in which she wrote of “anxious concern over the fate of Rome—concern which, judging by the extreme solicitude the Allies were showing for the Monte Cassino Monastery, seemed hardly necessary.” The solicitude ended on the night of February 15–16 when the Americans, believing that Germans had taken up positions in the monastery, dropped 1,400 tons of bombs onto it, almost twice the tonnage the Luftwaffe dropped on London during the first night of the 1940 Blitz. The bombing left the monastery in ruins, although its walls remained somewhat intact. The New Zealanders attacked the next morning and were repulsed. The
Germans had not, in fact, been inside the monastery, but they soon occupied the ruins, which afforded them almost perfect protection.
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