The Day of Battle (34 page)

The scheme was cockamamie—“perfectly asinine,” as Clark put it, and “tactically unsound,” according to the AFHQ staff. In the course of the
AVALANCHE
planning, Major General Ridgway for more than a month had been ordered to prepare his 82nd for one ill-conceived mission after another, including a proposed amphibious landing north of Naples, although “not one individual in the entire division, officer or enlisted man, had ever had any experience or instruction in amphibious operations.” Nothing, apparently, had been learned from the airborne disasters in Sicily. One 82nd Airborne officer, echoing Macmillan’s phrase, lamented the “remarkable
series of orders, counter-orders, plans, changes in plans, marches and counter-marches, missions and remissions, by air, water, and land.”

GIANT II
, as the drop on Rome was code-named, was the most “harebrained” notion yet, in Ridgway’s estimation. The division would arrive piecemeal—because of an aircraft shortage, only two battalions could jump the first night—on a pair of airfields twenty miles northwest of Rome and nearly two hundred miles from the Salerno landings. Before leaving Cassibile, Castellano had rashly promised that Italian forces would silence all antiaircraft weapons; outline the runways with amber lights; block approach avenues to the drop zones; and provide vital matériel that included 355 trucks, 12 ambulances, 500 laborers, 50 interpreters, 100 miles of barbed wire, picks, shovels, switchboards, fuel, and rations.

The more Ridgway heard, the less he believed. The Italians, he warned Smith, “are deceiving us and have not the capability for doing what they are promising.” Smith disagreed, insisting that inflamed Romans would assist the 82nd by dropping “kettles, bricks, [and] hot water on the Germans in the streets of Rome.” Alexander was equally cavalier, crediting “full faith” to Italian guarantees. “Don’t give this another thought, Ridgway,” he added. “Contact will be made with your division in three days—five days at the most.” But when Ridgway persisted, warning of the “sacrifice of my division,” Alexander agreed to let him gauge Italian resolve by infiltrating a pair of American officers into downtown Rome.

As the sun sank into the Tyrrhenian Sea on Tuesday, September 7, the Italian corvette
Ibis
rounded the headland at Gaeta, a scruffy port midway between Naples and Rome where, Virgil recounted, Aeneas had buried his beloved nurse. As the helmsman eased through a minefield and into the harbor, two American officers on the corvette’s lower bridge deranged their uniforms, tousled their hair, and splashed themselves with seawater. “Look disconsolate,” an Italian admiral advised them. Dockworkers watched from the quay while bawling Italian tars prodded the men down the gangplank and into a naval staff car, apparent prisoners-of-war bound for an interrogation cell.

In truth they were the Italians’ guests, having been plucked from a British patrol boat after a secret rendezvous north of Palermo early that morning. A handsome, graceful Missourian was the ranking officer of the pair. Brigadier General Maxwell D. Taylor had been first captain of his West Point class and now, at age forty-two, commanded the 82nd Airborne’s artillery. A gifted linguist who had taught French and Spanish at the academy, Taylor evinced a diplomatic bearing that, together with his study of “Italian in Twenty Lessons,” sufficiently qualified him for this secret
mission. Beneath his Army field jacket he carried 70,000 lire—equivalent to $700—in a money belt borrowed from the photographer Robert Capa, who had won it in a poker game. Colonel William T. Gardiner, junior in rank but senior in age at fifty-one, wore his Army Air Forces dress uniform with ribbons earned in both this war and the last one. A former lawyer who was also fluent in French, Gardiner had served as the speaker of Maine’s house of representatives and then, for four years, as governor. Both men knew intimate details of the Salerno invasion, set to begin in hours, and before leaving Sicily they had been advised: “If you get captured, put your forgetter to work.”

Through Gaeta the staff car rolled, slowing to yield the right-of-way to military trucks packed with German soldiers in flanged helmets. On a remote road outside Gaeta, the vehicle lurched to a halt beside a waiting ambulance with frosted side windows. The Americans climbed in back with their luggage, including a radio in a fine leather case. North they sped, hugging the coast as far as Terracina, then veering inland at twilight on the ancient Via Appia, through the Latin countryside and the drained polders of the Pontine Marshes, past the walled vineyards and the roadside tombs and the stone highway markers that counted down the distance to Rome.

By 8:30
P.M
., Taylor and Gardiner had been deposited at the Palazzo Caprara, a four-story mansion opposite the Italian war office at the intersection of Via Firenze and Via XX Settembre in central Rome. In a wainscoted suite on the palazzo’s second floor, Italian waiters set a table with linen and silver, then served consommé, veal cutlets, and crêpes Suzette catered by the Grand Hotel. Italian staff officers came and went, shrugging off Taylor’s requests to meet with the high command. “It appeared to me that they were attempting to stall,” Gardiner later noted.

The excellent crêpes notwithstanding, Taylor’s protests grew shrill; finally, at 9:30
P.M
., the door swung open for the magisterial entrance of General Giacomo Carboni, commander of the four divisions responsible for Rome’s outer defenses. In buffed boots and immaculate tunic, with pomaded hair and a thin sliver of a mustache, Carboni struck Taylor as “a professional dandy.” Unfurling his map, he pointed to the German positions encircling the capital: 12,000 paratroopers bivouacked along the coast, from the south bank of the Tiber halfway to Anzio; another 24,000 men and 200 tanks in the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division holding a crescent-shaped area to the north; still more forces around Frascati, to the southeast.

Italian garrisons had been virtually immobilized and disarmed, Carboni continued. The Germans had stopped supplying fuel and ammunition. Some artillery batteries had only twenty rounds per gun. The Italian air force needed another week to make arrangements for the 82nd Airborne’s
seizure of the two airfields; among other shortfalls, few trucks could be arranged to move the division. In a battle for Rome against the Germans, Carboni estimated, his forces would last just five hours. Some units had enough ammo to fight for only twenty minutes.

“If the Italians declare an armistice, the Germans will occupy Rome, and the Italians can do little to prevent it,” he said. The arrival of U.S. paratroopers would simply “provoke the Germans to more drastic action.” Carboni spread his manicured hands in a gesture of helplessness.

Clearly, Castellano’s blithe assurances were shaky; so, it seemed, was the surrender signed at Cassibile four days earlier. Stunned and alarmed, Taylor and Gardiner demanded to be taken to see Marshal Badoglio. Carboni temporized. The marshal was an old man, fast asleep. Surely this could wait until morning. More demands, more demurrals, but at length the Americans found themselves speeding across Rome in Carboni’s car to Badoglio’s villa. A midnight air raid had already roused the household; servants with flashlights and officers in pajamas flitted across the veranda and through the lush garden. Carboni vanished across the foyer, leaving the Americans to pace the vast carpets, studying the statuary and the oil landscapes hung on the white marble walls.

Fifteen minutes later the marshal appeared, dressed in a charcoal-gray civilian suit and low brown shoes. Bald, aging, and cordial, he reminded Gardiner of “an old hound dog” as he invited the men to take chairs in his study. The conqueror of Ethiopia, Badoglio had resigned as chief of Italy’s armed services in 1940 after the debacle in Greece. He passed his days playing cards and medicating himself with champagne from a wine cellar said to hold five thousand bottles. Only Mussolini’s arrest and the king’s summons had brought him from retirement. “I was a Fascist because the king was a Fascist,” he later explained with a shrug. “I do what the king tells me.”

Taylor asked in French whether Badoglio agreed with Carboni that “an immediate armistice and the reception of airborne troops” were impossible.

The marshal nodded. “Castellano did not know all the facts. Italian troops cannot possibly defend Rome.” Stepping to a large map, he pointed to the “natural defenses across Italy” that aided the Germans. “Supposing, just for the sake of discussion, landings were made at Salerno,” he continued with a knowing look. “There would be many, many difficulties.”

“Are you more afraid of the Germans than you are of us?” Taylor asked. “If you fail to announce the armistice there will be nothing left for us to do but to bomb and destroy Rome ourselves.”

Badoglio’s voice thickened. “Why would you want to bomb the city of people who are trying to aid you?”

Would General Taylor return to Algiers and explain this predicament to General Eisenhower? he asked. General Taylor would not. But perhaps Marshal Badoglio should write a message describing his “change in attitude.” Badoglio nodded, took up a pen, and drafted a single paragraph in Italian, which included the fatal phrase: “It is no longer possible to accept an immediate armistice.” Taylor drafted his own concise message, dated September 8 at 0121 hours: “
GIANT TWO
is impossible.” An aide took the cables to be encrypted and dispatched by radio.

Badoglio and Carboni stood, and snapped to attention with a sharp clicking of heels. “We returned the gesture,” Gardiner recalled, “endeavoring to click our heels as loudly as the Italians. There was quite a contest.” Badoglio spoke of honor, and of his half century as a soldier. He seemed near tears as the Americans left.

Disheartened and exhausted, Taylor and Gardiner returned to the Palazzo Caprara. They spoke in whispers for fear of eavesdropping microphones as Wednesday’s sunrise brought Rome to life. Had the messages reached Algiers? There was no reply, and
GIANT II
was scheduled to begin in less than ten hours. At 8:20
A.M
., Taylor sent another coded warning, stressing Italian rejection of the airborne mission. Pacing back and forth in what they now called “our hideout,” the two men considered taking a stroll outside but could not find a civilian jacket big enough for the burly Gardiner.

At 11:35
A.M
., Taylor radioed the two-word emergency code that urged cancellation of
GIANT II
: “Situation innocuous.” From overhead came the drone of aircraft, followed by the distant grumble of bombs detonating to the southeast. At last a return message arrived from Algiers: “You will return to Allied headquarters.” Grabbing the leather case, they again slipped into a waiting ambulance and sped to an airfield outside Rome, whence an Italian military trimotor spirited them to North Africa.

Eisenhower left Algiers early Wednesday morning to fly to his forward headquarters outside Tunis. The big white house at Amilcar, with its intricate mosaic floor and sun-washed terrace above the bright bay, hardly suggested a field camp; the only audible gunfire came from carbines plinking at targets tossed in the water beyond the dock. But moving to the forward command post on occasion gave desk-bound AFHQ—and its commander—at least the illusion of being on the march. With the landings at Salerno set to begin before dawn on Thursday, Eisenhower wanted to confer a final time with his top lieutenants in Tunisia. In a brief note to Mamie, he admitted to feeling “rather stretched out at the moment”; he was sleeping poorly, and the Mediterranean campaign had become so consuming, he told her, that he felt like “a creature of war.”

So it was that when Badoglio’s renunciation of the armistice was finally decoded at AFHQ headquarters at eight
A.M
.—seven hours after transmission—Eisenhower had gone. Smith forwarded the doleful message and Taylor’s initial advisory to Amilcar, then fretted for three hours until also passing them to the Combined Chiefs with a request for advice. Marshall soon recommended publicly revealing the signed Cassibile agreement. “No consideration need be given the embarrassment it might cause the Italian government,” he added. Churchill was visiting the White House and still in his wool nightshirt when Smith’s cable arrived. “That’s what you would expect from those Dagoes,” he growled.

In the small schoolhouse outside Bizerte where Alexander kept his Tunisian headquarters, Eisenhower late Wednesday morning had just finished reviewing the
AVALANCHE
preparations when a staff officer handed him the dispatches from Smith, Badoglio, and Taylor. His face flushed until his cheeks were as pink as the message forms, one witness reported. The broad mouth tightened, the veins in his wide forehead thickened. Seizing a pencil he snapped it in half; seizing another he snapped it, too, and “expressed himself with great violence,” a British officer noted. If angry at Smith’s presumption in asking for help from Washington and London, he was enraged at the Italians. Badoglio was “an old man and inclined to temporize,” especially with “the Germans pressing a revolver against his kidneys.” Snapping off each syllable, he dictated a blistering reply to Badoglio: “If you or any part of your armed forces fail to cooperate as previously agreed I will publish to the world a full record of this affair…. I do not accept your message of this morning postponing the armistice.” By the time he composed the twelfth and final sentence of his message, Eisenhower’s voice had risen to a shout: “Failure now on your part to carry out the full obligations of the signed agreement will have the most serious consequences for your country.”

“I always knew you had to give these yellow bastards a jab in the stomach before they would work,” he added. To the Charlie-Charlies he dictated another message Wednesday afternoon: “We will not recognize any deviation from our original agreement.”

Clearly a deviation was needed in the
GIANT II
plan. Some 150 C-47 transport planes were to begin lifting off at 5:45
P.M
., carrying the first two thousand paratroopers over Rome. As Taylor’s repeated warnings finally reached Tunisia, Alexander sent a postponement order to General Ridgway’s command post at the Licata South airfield on Sicily. No acknowledgment came back. Eisenhower ordered Alexander’s U.S. deputy, Brigadier General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, to personally carry the message to Licata. Still in his pinks-and-greens office uniform, Lemnitzer rushed to El Aouina
airfield, commandered a British Beaufighter, and by bracing against the fuselage struts managed to wedge himself behind the nonplussed pilot. After a harrowing takeoff, they reached Sicily in an hour but failed to find Licata until Lemnitzer, after spotting Mount Etna, ordered the pilot to turn around and follow the coastline south and west.