The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (35 page)

More than ever, Naples was a military town, sustaining two Allied armies that for a year had clawed their way up the Italian Peninsula. Although since June 6 the campaign seemed to have been reduced to a dismal backwater, two dozen divisions kept punching north of Rome, under the American Fifth Army in the west and the British Eighth Army in the east. German troops had abandoned Florence on August 7, and Allied forces now planned to assault the Gothic Line, yet another of those heartbreaking barriers built across the spiny Apennines. Troops poured into Naples for a final respite before the battle resumed, not just for “I&I”—intercourse and intoxication—but also for more sedate pastimes, like watching Dorothy Lamour in
Riding High
at the big open-air theater, or sipping a gin fizz at the Orange Club, or splashing about in the huge swimming pool with statuary nudes built for an antebellum world’s fair.

But it was not the Allied armies preparing to breach the Gothic Line that now preoccupied military Naples. Rather, it was the quarter-million men seconded to Operation
DRAGOON,
who under Plan 4-44 had begun slipping inconspicuously from the port on August 9 for the invasion of southern France. Day by day more convoys left Naples, joined by ships from Malta and Palermo, Brindisi and Taranto, Bizerte and Oran, until nearly nine hundred vessels plied ten arterial routes across the Mediterranean, converging within striking distance of Provence along the west coast of Corsica. Making up the great fleet were attack transports and Liberty ships, LSTs and LCTs, twenty-one cruisers and eighty-seven destroyers and five battleships, including
Texas, Nevada,
and
Arkansas,
those smoke-stained veterans of Normandy.

By August 13, the 36th and 45th Infantry Divisions had finished their last rehearsals at Salerno, where wrecked Higgins boats and moldering corpses could still be found from the divisions’ death struggle there the previous September. Now troops sat beneath tarpaulins on the transport decks, sewing shoulder flashes to uniform sleeves or thumbing through
A Pocket Guide to France.
The last tanks, trucks, and rubber terrain models were bullied into the holds. From the docks, cranes hoisted ten L-4 Piper Grasshoppers onto
LST-906,
which had been overlaid with a flight deck to serve as a makeshift aircraft carrier for artillery spotter planes. “Many a New Day” from
Oklahoma!
blared from loudspeakers on U.S.S.
Henrico,
while 3rd Division soldiers tuned a small radio to Axis Sally, a propaganda doxy in Berlin, who boasted that she was well acquainted with Allied designs on southern France. Unimpressed, the troops never glanced up from their poker game.

Pacing the bridge of the flagship, U.S.S.
Catoctin,
was a portly seafarer with cascading chins and as much experience at seizing a hostile shore as any American in uniform: Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, who would command the invasion until ground forces were well inland. A native of Hackensack, New Jersey, Hewitt as a young Naval Academy ensign had circled the globe aboard U.S.S.
Missouri
with Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, and in the four decades since, he had sailed the wettest corners of the remotest seas. Thirty years ago, he had been in Naples harbor as a navigator aboard U.S.S.
Idaho
when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot dead in Sarajevo; he recalled vividly the battleship lowering her flag to half mast, as if to salute a dying world. Hewitt had won the Navy Cross for valor in the ensuing war, and many decorations subsequently. In this war, too, he had distinguished himself by putting Patton’s forces on the strand in both Morocco and Sicily despite ferocious storms. He was lucky, skilled, and unflappable. Now, as his crew prepared to cast off, Hewitt took a seat on the flag bridge and with a pencil stub began working a double-crostic. The puzzles lifted him above his troubles.

Troubles he had.
DRAGOON
had begun dreadfully. On August 4, Rear Admiral Don Moon, who had commanded the naval force at Utah Beach and would oversee the right wing of the
DRAGOON
landings, had begged Hewitt to postpone the invasion. For hours he argued that forces had arrived in Naples too late to prepare properly, that assault training had been too skimpy, that the forewarned Germans would butcher the landing teams. Hewitt had known Moon as an Annapolis midshipman, knew him to be intense, overworked, and reluctant to delegate authority; he evidently did not know that Moon on June 6 had tried to persuade Joe Collins to suspend the Utah landings, or that the ship’s doctor aboard Moon’s
Catoctin
had treated him for acute depression, or that the fleet medical officer also had interviewed Moon about his mental balance. “I don’t think it’s as bad as you think it is,” Hewitt told him. He promised to consider Moon’s plea.

At seven the next morning, Moon rang from his cabin to ask for orange juice. Fifteen minutes later, a steward entered the stateroom, opened the blackout curtain, and found the admiral, dressed in shorts and undershirt, sitting on the sofa with a .45 in his right hand, his eyes open, and a red worm of blood trickling from his ear. The spent bullet was found in the shower. A note in neat cursive on a ruled pad explained: “The mind is gone.… My mind is running cycles with occasional nearly lucid periods and then others the complete reverse.… What am I doing to you my wife and dear children? I am sick,
so
sick.” An inquest before noon ruled death had come “during a period of insanity.” The certificate read: “Cause: suicide, gunshot wound, head. Combat fatigue.” He was buried at five
P.M.
, ten hours after his passing, in the Naples military cemetery. To his widow and four children, Collins later wrote, “He was a casualty of this war just as much as if he had been killed in action.” Hewitt sent his own chief of staff to take Moon’s command.

At two
P.M.
on August 13, under clear skies on a calm sea,
Catoctin, Bayfield,
and more than two dozen transports eased away from the docks and built to twelve knots. An escort of sixteen warships joined this final convoy as it steamed from the Naples anchorage. A witness thought of John Masefield’s lines from Gallipoli: “All that they felt was a gladness of exultation that their young courage was to be used.”

Vesuvius had begun to recede in the distance when a commotion on deck caught Hewitt’s attention. A British admiral’s barge, making for the port from the island of Ischia, could be seen weaving among the outbound ships. A stubby figure with pink cheeks stood in the forepeak, disdaining a handhold and wearing a light tropical suit beneath an enormous sun helmet. Abruptly from soldiers and sailors crowding
Catoctin
’s rails a cry went up: “It’s Churchill!” So it was: with a smile he doffed his ten-gallon helmet, wispy hair tossing in the breeze, then raised his right hand to flash the famous V with his fingers. The men huzzahed until he slid from sight in their wake.

*   *   *

He was traveling under the improbable nom de guerre of Colonel Kent, as if a phony name and a big hat could render him inconspicuous. Ostensibly Churchill was on a fortnight’s bathing holiday in southern Italy, wallowing “like a benevolent hippo” at Capri’s Blue Grotto and in various Tyrrhenian coves around Naples while following the heartening news from Normandy in his portable map room. Yet he also had come to keep a pale eye on an enterprise he still bitterly opposed, and which had churned up as much enmity within the Anglo-American alliance as any episode of the war.

DRAGOON
, originally called
ANVIL
, had first been intended as a diversion during
OVERLORD
to occupy eighteen German divisions south of the Loire in Army Group G. Shipping shortages and delays in capturing Rome forced a postponement until long after the Normandy landings, yet the Americans remained keen on the operation. Marseille and Toulon would provide ports at a time when dozens of U.S. Army divisions were stuck at home for lack of dockage in Normandy.
DRAGOON
could discomfit the enemy with a thrust up the Rhône valley, an invasion route since Caesar’s wars, and it would profitably employ several veteran French divisions now fighting in Italy; with a mother country still to liberate, De Gaulle had forbidden those forces to venture beyond the river Arno. “France,” Eisenhower told the British, “is the decisive theater.”

The British disagreed, politely at first, then adamantly. Churchill warned Roosevelt of a “bleak and sterile” invasion through Provence, followed by “very great hazards, difficulties, and delays” in slogging up the Rhône. Marseille lay four hundred miles from Paris, and a battle there was unlikely to influence the fight for northern France; simply reaching Lyon, he predicted, would take three months. Pulling the U.S. VI Corps and the French divisions from Italy “is unacceptable to us,” the British military chiefs added. Instead, why not blast across the Po valley in northern Italy, swing east with help from an amphibious landing at Trieste, and drive through the so-called Ljubljana Gap in Slovenia to reach Austria and the Danube valley? The Allied commander in Italy, Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, promised Churchill that he intended to “eliminate the German forces in Italy. I shall then have nothing to prevent me from marching on Vienna.” This thrust of “a dagger under the armpit,” as the prime minister called it, might even force Hitler to abandon France in order to shore up his southeastern front.

Back and forth the argument flew like a shuttlecock. In an exasperated message to Marshall, Eisenhower decried the project of “wandering off overland via Trieste to Ljubljana.… We must concentrate our forces.… We need big ports.” Even if the Germans in Italy collapsed, and heavily fortified Trieste fell, threading the gap meant traversing a high col only thirty miles wide, followed by six-thousand-foot mountains with poor roads, worse rails, and more narrow valleys. Pentagon studies, noting that “the Austrians held off the Italians [in this region] for four years in World War I,” concluded that “not more than seven divisions at the outside could be pushed through” to Austria. Churchill advised Alexander to be ready to dash to Vienna with armored cars, even though British planners reckoned a need for at least fifteen divisions. (“Winston is a gambler,” his physician later explained, “and gamblers do not count the coins in their pockets.”) Brooke privately decried “Winston’s strategic ravings” about campaigning “through the Alps in winter.” While also skeptical of
DRAGOON
, Brooke advised telling Washington, “If you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we shall be damned fools with you.”

The prime minister would have none of it. Later he portrayed his scheme as a way to forestall Soviet domination of eastern Europe, but in the summer of 1944 no such argument was advanced. In a windy message to Roosevelt marked “strictly private, personal, and top secret,” he warned of “the complete ruin of all our great affairs in the Mediterranean.… This has sunk very deeply into my mind.” The president rebuffed him with election-year logic another politician could understand: “I would never survive even a slight setback in
OVERLORD
if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”

Still Churchill persisted, flying to Normandy with an escort of six Spitfires as Mortain and Falaise began to unfold, hectoring Eisenhower, Bradley, and others with, as an Army staff officer described, “beautifully colored speech, hunched forward on his chair, his eyes slightly red and beady, scattering cigar ashes on the floor and hiding his burnt match under the seat.” After directing British commanders to examine “in the greatest secrecy” whether
DRAGOON
forces could be diverted to Brittany, the prime minister urged Eisenhower to do just that. This was a loony caprice, so “extremely unwise” that it would “cause the utmost confusion everywhere,” as the Pentagon advised. Not least, tens of thousands of troops were already boarding vessels insufficiently seaworthy to venture beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and no major Breton port would open for weeks. “Ike said no, continued saying no all afternoon, and ended up saying no in every form of the English language at his command,” Harry Butcher wrote. In a subsequent session in London, Churchill wept copiously and threatened to “lay down the mantle of my high office.” “I have never seen him so obviously stirred, upset, and even despondent,” Eisenhower cabled Marshall on August 11, after a taxing confrontation at 10 Downing Street. Roosevelt put paid to the wrangling in nine words: “There is no more to be done about it.”

Unable to move the president or his lieutenants, Churchill raged with the ineffectual petulance of a declining power. Denouncing the “sheer folly” of his “strong and dominating partner,” he slipped into first-person royal: “We have been ill-treated and are furious. Do not let any smoothings or smirchings cover up this fact.… If we take this lying down, there will be no end to what will be put upon us.” Even the king’s equerry told his diary, “Winston is very bitter about it, and not so sure that he really likes FDR.” As for Marshall and the other American chiefs, Churchill now derided them to Brooke as “one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.” To Clementine he later wrote, “The only times I ever quarrel with the Americans are when they fail to give us a fair share of the opportunity to win glory.”

And so he had come to Naples to take the waters. Britain would win the war while losing this battle and most other battles waged against the Americans henceforth. More than two years of bickering over strategy—with London usually prevailing—had made Marshall truculent and inclined to agree with the State Department adage that “an Englishman’s idea of cooperation is to persuade someone to do what he wants him to do.” Even Roosevelt would later declare, “Churchill is always a disperser.” This contretemps was indeed the final gasp of the prime minister’s cherished peripheral strategy for winning World War II; it had become incoherent, in the judgment of the historian Michael Howard. The fabled soft underbelly was “a slogan not a strategy,” another British historian concluded, a hodgepodge of improvisations. While the Americans were wary of British imperial interests in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe, the project of stealing a march on the Russians was both impractical—the Red Army already was poised to spread through Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary, and communist partisans were ascendant in Yugoslavia—and strategically suspect. Why antagonize Moscow when Soviet forces continued to do “the main work of tearing the guts out of the German army,” as Churchill himself told the House of Commons in early August?