The Day of Battle (47 page)

Mark Clark’s plan called for his infantry divisions to force the Mignano Gap and then converge on the Liri Valley, where tanks could spearhead a run for the capital. On Fifth Army’s far right, the 34th and 45th Divisions crept through the Apennine crags, using herds of goats to clear highland minefields. Vietinghoff accurately observed of his American adversary here: “Every step forward into the mountainous terrain merely increased his difficulties.”

On the left flank, the British 56th Division tried to loop around the western lip of the Mignano Gap on November 5 by attacking Monte Camino, a “steep solid rock leading God knows where,” as one rifleman put it. Expecting only German pickets, the 201st Guards Brigade instead found the Bernhardt Line: mines, machine guns, and mortar pits blasted from an exposed face dubbed Bare Arse Ridge. Heath fires lighted the scarps and cols, as Guardsmen clawed up a succession of summits only to find that they were false crests overshadowed by still higher ground.

Three panzer grenadier counterattacks on November 8 nearly flicked the British from the mountain. Tommies built stone breastworks against singing mortar fragments and a frigid east wind, stripping rations and ammo from the dead, and brewing tea with muddy water scooped from shell holes. Without blankets or winter battle dress, the wounded died from exposure; three forward Guards companies dwindled to a hundred men, combined. “A small earthquake added to the unpleasantness,” a Scots Guard account noted. In the end, four British battalions could not overcome five entrenched German battalions; after a horrid week Clark approved a withdrawal from what was now called Murder Mountain. Dead men remained propped at their posts with helmets on and rifles ready, a
rear guard faithful to the end and beyond. “Altogether,” the Coldstream Guards history explained, “the difficulties were too great.”

Too great as well for Truscott’s 3rd Division in the Fifth Army center. A ten-day effort to seize Monte la Difensa, a geological appendage to Murder Mountain, proved just as futile. On the evening of November 5, corps commander Lucas phoned Truscott with orders from Clark to help the British by also attacking Monte Lungo, one of those isolated hill masses inside the gap. Protesting the lack of reconnaissance, air support, and artillery, Truscott asked to speak to Clark.

“Damn it,” Lucas replied. “You know the position I’m in with him. That would only make it worse, and put me in a helluva hole. You have just got to do it.”

“I still think it’s wrong,” Truscott said, then ordered his 30th Infantry forward. One battalion captured conical Monte Rotondo and another secured a modest foothold on Lungo: that far and no farther.

As the grim season wore on, the suffering grew epic. Audie Murphy noted that the “faces of the dead seem green and unearthly. This is bad for the morale, as it makes a man reflect upon what his own life may come to.” Since arriving in Italy less than two months earlier, the 3rd Division had tallied 8,600 casualties. Losses included almost 400 officers—half of the division’s second lieutenants among them—and nearly 4,000 privates. The three infantry regiments had lost 70 percent of their strength, an indicator of “how fragile an infantry division really is,” Truscott told Beetle Smith.

To wife Sarah on November 10 he wrote, “You are in my thoughts a thousand times a day.” He later added, “One day merges into another while time is measured only by the capture of the next ridge, the crossing of the next stream. I’m a bit grayer than when you saw me last, but otherwise unchanged in appearance.” Even amid carnage Truscott tried to honor the beauty of this world by placing autumn flowers on his field desk every day. He also dispatched an aide to Naples to replenish the command post’s liquor supply; the lieutenant returned with thirty-five bottles of cognac. “I only pray,” Truscott told Sarah, “that I can live and measure up to what my lads seem to expect of me.”

Ernie Pyle returned to the front in November after two months at home. Rested if not reinvigorated, he quickly sized up the Italian campaign. “The land and the weather were both against us,” he wrote. “The country was shockingly beautiful, and just as shockingly hard to capture from the enemy.” He listened to “shells chase each other through the sky across the mountains ahead, making a sound like cold wind blowing on a winter
night.” Pyle found “almost inconceivable misery,” as well as a bemused fortitude. When gunners calculated that it cost $25,000 in artillery shells for each enemy soldier killed, one GI asked, “Why wouldn’t it be better to just offer the Germans $25,000 to surrender?”

A diarist in the 56th Evacuation Hospital noted that even away from the front lines life was spare: “No shelves, no dresser, no hooks or nails on a wall. No bed table, no reading table, no cabinets. No floor except a muddy, wet one.” Pyle described a soldier playing poker by candlelight who abruptly murmured, “War, my friends, is a silly business. War is the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

Irony and dark humor—“the greatest of protections against crackup,” in one soldier’s estimation—grew ever sharper in the ranks. During a showing of
Casablanca
in a British camp, when Humphrey Bogart’s gunshot victim crumpled to the ground, Tommies cried as one, “Stretcher bearer!” Spike Milligan, serving in the Royal Artillery, wrote his family, “The whole of this land we have arrived in is now top secret, in fact no one is allowed to know where it is…. However, the bloody Germans know where it is.” On November 9, Milligan wrote, “Nothing much to report except World War 2. Is it still going on where you are?”

Burial details sent out at night to retrieve the dead were known as the Ghouls. When a mobile shower unit arrived at one artillery battery, a quartet of naked gunners stood singing in barbershop formation for an hour. “It’s the loss of dirt,” one explained. “It leaves you dizzy.” A 36th Division soldier wrote his father that he now lived in “a remodeled pig shed. I say remodeled because there is no pig in it.” Others occupied a heatless hovel they named Villa des Chilblains, and soldiers hooted at a mistyped headquarters order: “Latrines: all troops will ensure that faces are covered with soil after each person has deprecated.” A platoon leader who learned that his battalion commander’s radio call sign was “Big Six,” speculated that to ring the division commander he should ask for “Big, Big, Big Six,” and to reach Eisenhower he must request “Six to the Maximum Power.”

Each man coped with calamity in his own fashion. Richard Tregaskis described a combat engineer sitting on a curb in Pietramelara in late October, nibbling the “cheese unit” from his C ration as a woman’s shrieks carried from a ruined building nearby. “She’s been yelling like that all day,” the soldier said. “Sometimes I feel kinda sorry for these poor people.” One night in mid-November, upon finding four dead 3rd Division soldiers in slit trenches, a sergeant said, “You can pray forever but those poor fellows are gone.” Pretending to play his rifle like a bull fiddle, the sergeant sang “Heart of My Heart,” while a comrade tipped his helmet forward like a vaudeville hoofer’s bowler and danced a jig to cheer the dead.

“You can’t believe men will do to each other the things they do,” a forward observer wrote his sister. “I suppose I’m soft, but I’ve got to say, God forgive us all.” A week later he was killed when a shell severed his jugular vein.

At 9:30
A.M
. on Thursday, November 11, Clark drove through the hills below Naples to Avellino, where a new American cemetery was to be dedicated on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the armistice ending World War I. Sunlight glinted from hundreds of white crosses and stars of David, perfectly arrayed in a former potato field.

“Here we are, a quarter century later, with the same Allies as before, fighting the same mad dogs that were loose in 1918,” Clark said, speaking without notes at the flagpole. “They gave their lives that the people at home could pursue the life which we have always wanted—a happy life—and that their children could go to the schools and churches they want, and follow the line of work they want. And we are fighting, first, to save our own land from devastation like this in Italy.”

He drew himself to his full height, a ramrod in a peaked cap. “We must not think about going home. None of us is going home until it’s over…. We’ve caught the torch that these men have flung us, and we’ll carry it to Berlin and to the great victory—a complete victory—which the united nations deserve.”

An honor guard fired thrice. Wadding from the blank cartridges fluttered across the graves. A bugler blew Taps, echoed by another, unseen bugler in a nearby arbor. “That was a good ceremony,” Clark said. His jaw set, he climbed back into the jeep to return to the battlefield.

Imperfect as a commander and at times insufferable as a person, Clark knew what he was fighting for. Few men would love him, some would detest him, but most recognized in him a forceful field general who was willful enough, indomitable enough to wage the hard war that the Italian campaign had become. He believed, as he had told Alexander’s chief of staff a week earlier, that “the war could be won in this theater”; he also believed that Fifth Army could seize Rome, “and intended to do so.” In part this was vainglory: resentful of Montgomery, Clark wanted Eighth Army to steer clear of the Italian capital and the hosannahs its capture would merit. Yet it also reflected his single-minded grit, and a determination to keep faith.
He
had caught the torch tossed by his dead soldiers, and he would carry it as far as necessary.

Clark knew that the current battle had stalled. Since crossing the Volturno, Lucas’s VI Corps had covered forty-five miles on Fifth Army’s right flank and twenty-five miles in the center, at Mignano. McCreery’s X
Corps on the left had covered seventeen miles. That yardage had cost the army ten thousand casualties since mid-October, and the equivalent of two divisions since landing at Salerno, including more than three thousand dead. Although the Liri Valley was barely a dozen miles ahead, it might just as well have been on the moon. MPs posted warning signs across the front, including “Nothing But Jerry Beyond This Point” and “If You Go Any Further Take a Cross With You.”

The British had disappointed Clark at the Volturno and in the attack on Monte Camino. “Why in the hell don’t you get going?” he had asked McCreery. Privately, and unfairly, Clark believed that American units were “the only ones I really could depend upon to slug it out.” In truth, although Fifth Army now numbered 244,000 men, Clark lacked enough reserves of any nationality to exploit a breakthrough even if he reached the Liri Valley.

Getting that far seemed doubtful in itself. Few of the troops now butting at the Bernhardt Line had mountain training. Most lacked “the born hillman’s eye for the best way up, down, or across a mountain,” as the official British history would conclude. Instead, “the major tactics of the Allies became, willy-nilly, a head-on battering” that also required enormous quantities of ammunition and the conversion of combat troops to porters and stretcher bearers. Will Lang of
Life
scribbled in his notebook: “Need one man carrying for every two men fighting.”

Worse yet, the battered docks in Naples limited resupply efforts. Wool clothing scheduled to arrive in mid-October was delayed until mid-November after ammunition took shipping priority. Shortages of tires, batteries, and spare parts immobilized three of every ten trucks, further hampering quartermasters trying to move matériel from port to battlefront. As the frozen corpses on Camino could attest, the Allies were utterly unprepared for winter. Much of the cold-weather gear under development in the States would not reach Italy for another year. Heavy combat boots would not arrive until February. British units doubled the blanket allowance from two to four, requisitioned sheepskin coats from Syria, and increased the daily sugar ration by four ounces for those fighting at altititudes above two thousand feet.

Too little, too late. “Cold ground trauma” injuries soared in November, including the first thousand cases of trench foot among American troops. Clark was aghast to learn that the British had begun breaking up a division every two months to field replacements. “I wish so many things were not done on a shoestring,” Lucas wrote. “This campaign was poorly planned in many respects. We should have at least twice as many troops.”

True, the Germans were also in a bad way, and there was always comfort in the misery of one’s adversary. Kesselring had stabilized the front by
throwing two more divisions into the fight, but the first ten days of November cost him more than two thousand casualties. “Under heavy artillery fire,” a German NCO wrote in his diary. “My morale is gone.” A captured letter from a soldier on the Adriatic front lamented, “The lice are at me now and I haven’t washed or shaved for a fortnight…. All I am doing is waiting for the war to end.” Another letter, written by a German soldier in Poland to a comrade captured in Italy by the 3rd Division, included a grim confession: “We have already liquidated our 1,200 Jewish slaves. We sent them to another ghetto, beyond the borders of life.”

Clark concluded that the time had come to pause. On Saturday, November 13, he met his senior commanders at the VI Corps command post and ticked off the battlefield realities: five of Fifth Army’s seven divisions had been in the line almost constantly since Salerno; the British were stalled at Monte Camino; casualties and supply troubles kept mounting. The army would “hold to its present positions” for at least two weeks. Commanders would ensure “that the troops get all the rest possible.” Planners would take the rest of the month to concoct a new scheme before the offensive resumed.