The World at War (65 page)

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

The trouble basically was, I think, Lucas did not really believe in the operation. Of course we didn't know it at the time, no soldier when you go into action is ever told the full thinking behind the piece of action or he'd never go near the place. But it was quite clear afterwards that the Americans were torn between whether to back this sort of thing wholeheartedly or to hedge on it. Now the higher command in America I'm sure never believed in the whole Italian business. They wanted to play it small but you can't tell an Army general 'we're just having a holding operation, toddle along quietly and don't get yourself killed too often, don't run any risks but keep the enemy under pressure'. You can't conduct war that way and Lucas was caught between these two awfully contradictory views. The British on the other hand were innocently convinced that we were going to land, lever the Southern Front loose and drive on to the Alban Hills, hold them to make certain that the Germans panicked and then up would come the Southern Front and we'd move to Rome. I had that very firmly in my mind when we landed. I'd no concept we were just going to sit down as soon as we landed and build a perimeter.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

At Anzio we got in there pretty much unopposed and established our beachhead and immediately we began to intercept the German radios. We were reading his mail at the time, we'd broken his code as you know, but nobody knew it at the time except those of us in command and I would get every blood-curdling message Hitler would personally send to his commander in Italy: drive us into the sea and drown us, and so forth. Hitler seized upon this as an opportunity to really give us a slap in the face. He ordered Army Commander von Mackensen to go in and set up an Army headquarters there, he ordered eight divisions in. He was able to take three away from the British front on the Adriatic and bring them in immediately, one and a half from Yugoslavia, from France, from Germany and he built up a tremendous force. We had the mail, we had the orders, and if we had pushed on out to beat him we would have been severely defeated and cut off completely. So we had to dig in on a line that was the maximum we could hold as a bridgehead and await the onslaught, which came within three or four days because his build-up was very rapid. I moved troops in just as fast as the landing craft could get 'em there, but I didn't have unlimited troops to move in. Those who said we could have stepped out and gone to the Alban Hills – well, we might have gotten a detachment to the Alban Hills but you'd have said goodbye to them because the build-up against us was too fast and too severe.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

When dawn broke we'd got complete surprise, we captured a German in his pyjamas in a farmhouse. He came up rubbing his eyes and got ready to shave and we surrounded him. Along the road there came this marvellous drunken car, swaying back and forwards, it was full of the most happy Germans who'd had a night out in Rome and they were staggering back, and they couldn't believe they were captured and they kept on embracing me, until finally we put them in the clink too. There wasn't a single shot fired at us basically. You looked out and you saw the troops flooding ashore, it was a most extraordinary sight, and there was a great feeling of exaltation sprang up. I remember then getting into a Jeep and I drove up the main road to Rome, and we came to a spot known as 'the Flyover', it was crossing with a bridge on it, where a side road went across the main road to Rome. We all thought that after a quarter of an hour brew-up and on we'd go, but we waited for hours and then a dispatch rider said consolidate. We never went forward from that particular spot for two weeks. It was the biggest shock of my life. I thought at least there would be flying columns sent out to break up the German resistance, even if we lost them we could have driven on to their headquarters. It wasn't an area that they had prepared defensively and if we'd had four or five tanks what chaos you would have created behind the lines. There was no plan to spread chaos, no plan to confuse the Germans. We came, we saw, we conquered – but we stayed where we were.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

I don't think it was carried out with sufficient vigour and aggressively in the early stages of the landing. My experience of combined operations goes back to the First World War in Gallipoli and there one learned that there is a moment after the initial landing when the enemy is in a state of uncertainty and doubt, and an opportunity which is a very fleeting one occurs. I think probably the same thing happened at Anzio, there was an opportunity for exploiting the original landing. I don't think it was seized – what the reasons were it's difficult for me to say.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

The enemy build-up was four or five times as fast as I could build up, so that although General Lucas could have moved further from Anzio he would soon have been met by an overwhelming force. He would have been defeated, no question about it, so we had to dig in on the biggest perimeter we could possibly digest and wait for the onslaught, which came. I remember that the first time I directed that our heavy bombers come in with close support it was a touch and go situation up there.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

Every aircraft they could spare in Italy came over for three or four days. It was known as saturation bombing and I remember watching one of the great raids coming over and you felt the earth had come to an end – it spouted in front of you, it shook, it shuddered and occasionally one went behind – when a soldier hears about precision bombing he digs a very deep hole and hides in it. On this occasion I thought there can't be a living German, the whole landscape heaved. There were wave after wave of these huge bombers coming over and the astonishing thing is about three-quarters of an hour later the Germans rose out of all this mess and came hopping towards us again. They didn't get very far, but the fact is that they survived it and were able to mount an attack.

GENERAL WESTPHAL

The German counter-attack at Anzio failed because exceptionally bad weather which made impossible to moving the armoured cars and the artillery and the training of the troops who was not as strong enough for succeed. Nevertheless, we were very near to the sea, but at that moment, we had no reports from the first battalions who attack and I was very anxious that we would have too big losses, and I proposed to Field Marshal Kesselring to end this attack.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

I still to this day don't understand German tactics, but they went back to the First World War, bringing in unit after unit, and there was a moment when you actually saw them leaving their lines like those old films of the Somme battle, and falling down as our machine guns took them. Anzio was the nearest approach to World War One that I've ever heard in the last war; we even had trenches afterwards. But on this assault it was like the Somme all over again and they came over a moon landscape complete with wrecked tanks, abandoned Jeeps along the road and wire dangling down. The German units would come forward and I was lying looking up and every time the shells came over, crouched down. I think that the biggest memory of battle is when you're lying cringing against the earth or an old piece of broken brick, anything, and suddenly these little shapes are popping up. There were sounds of ratatats of machine guns and thuds of guns and the guns were screaming over us all the time. The gunfire in Anzio was terrific, it was almost done like a battleship control, every gun firing as one.

SERGEANT BILL BECKETT

Sherwood Foresters

When we was in the line you'd got to send one or two men out of your section to fetch your water and your rations. They used to take a ball of white tape and used to plug into your position and used to trail this white tape to where they'd got to pick up the rations then follow the tape back. Well, in the meantime, a German patrol had come to take the tape and pinned it in his position so you'd carry the rations and water and it was, 'Right, thank you, Tommy, put it right there'. Next morning soon as it's daylight they used to be shouting to you just over the hill, 'Have you got your water, Tommy, have you got your rations?' You'd just peep over and you'd see all your mates lined up getting into lorries.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

The situation was that Alexander had committed himself to doing everything in his power and using all his resources to the limit, in order to pin down German and Italian troops in Italy – German in particular – to prevent their being moved away from Italy to reinforce the Western Front. He therefore felt his duty to continue the operations against Cassino. After one or two more abortive attempts to drive the Germans off the Cassino monastery hill and to get up the Rapido valley, I came to the conclusion that the German strength and particularly the skill with which the German commanders were able to manipulate their troops on the battlefield, the advantage they were able to take from their tactical training and organisation to carry out effective blocking and laying operations in that difficult terrain meant that we would never have succeeded in breaking the Gustav Line unless we launched an offensive on a wide front from Cassino to the sea. The plan was to make use of our superiority in armour, artillery, the air and in infantry on the main front. At the same time to make use of our position at Anzio to fox the enemy to where the main assault was coming and to prevent him from moving quickly from the Anzio front to the main front and vice versa.

SHERWOOD FORESTERS

Group interview, Nottingham pub

We got closer together, the longer it went on the closer we became, because we knew there was only one way out of it, and that was into the sea or get out the other way . . . And it did happen, eventually we got out the other way . . . After three months it was demoralising what was seen, I'm telling yer . . . It was every night, every night everybody was hunting Germans, everybody was out to kill anybody. You used to go out – I used to go out on me own, creeping, to kill. We was insane . . . Yeah, I think we did become like that, we did become like animals in the end, eventually . . . Yes, just like rats . . . Yes, oh yes.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

We got into a marvellous position, we broke into the hills and then we were going to get across the German line. We got to a little place called Artina and I could see down below in the Valmontone the German Army desperately trying to get through it, the Goring Division moving up through the vineyards below us and we had 'em. If we'd only chucked in the full weight of our Army right nobody would have got out from further south in Cassino. I can't understand to this day why he switched the attack because Mark Clark was no fool. It's quite true that he whipped the sign outside
Rome for his bathroom but otherwise he was a damn good general, and he had to keep the Americans fighting although they didn't really have their hearts in it. But for some reason he pushed us through the hills instead of cutting across the German line. Maybe he wanted to get into Rome before the British, but anyhow the Germans were able to pull out.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

I took heavy casualties in coming over the mountains and there was no chance, in my opinion, for me to have cut the Germans off. First, they're too smart – they wouldn't have remained in a position where I could just attack on their flank and defeat them, they had other access roads from the south leading to the north. But the main reason I couldn't do it was that I couldn't attack to the cast from the bridgehead without taking all the hills that were heavily defended by the Germans, who would have debouched into my flank and raised havoc with me. I would have suffered heavy casualties if I had attacked to the east without taking the Alban Hills and I didn't have the means to do both.

MAJOR GENERAL HARDING

If I may put it diplomatically, I think General Clark was overwhelmed by the wish to be the first into Rome, which he would have done anyhow. I think that's why he suddenly went contrary to what Alexander had intended to do. The intention was that the break-out from Anzio, to direct it on Valmontone to cut the main route by which the German forces would withdraw. The whole concept of the operation from Anzio was with that intention. By diverting his axis to advance from almost due east to north-east he missed an opportunity of cutting off some forces, but he was attracted, I think, by the magnet of Rome.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL CLARK

But don't think that Rome didn't loom as a very interesting prize in our path. When the President came to see me, President Roosevelt in Italy, he said, 'I'm not sure that you can extract yourself from the battle but I'm going to be in Sicily and I'd love to see you.' I went down to see him and he handed me a letter and said, 'I didn't think you could come and I've written you a letter.' In it is how anxious we were to capture Rome, to liberate Rome. And I had been told by my government, by General Marshall, of the approximate time of Ike's cross-Channel landing and of the hope that I could capture Rome before, because it would be quite a blow to the Axis if these two could be coordinated.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

Well, the liberation of Rome was the last Roman holiday on a big scale, I suppose, in history. I arrived at dawn and first of all people came rather anxiously out in the streets. You don't know who's going to liberate who, I mean you can easily lose your watch if you come too soon to greet the liberators. You've got to let the gallant defenders of freedom go back and the bringers of the new freedom arrive and it's a very nice thing to know when to come out of your cellars.

BILL MAULDIN

American cartoonist with
Stars and Stripes

Thinking of the poverty of Italy and the destruction of its cities and villages, especially in the south, reminded me of a dog that had been run over while running out to bite the tyres of a passing automobile. I had the feeling, certainly most people did at the time, that Mussolini was an opportunist and was trying in a sense to get on Hitler's bandwagon and grab all the loot he could along the way, and just dragged his country into it. The Italians are not – back in Roman days they were different – but they're not the world's greatest fighters. It's one of the things I love about them, really. But they love parades and I think this was where Mussolini got his support – he gave everybody lots of parades and it's terribly impressive, I'm sure, to stand in Rome or Milan or wherever and see all these glittering robes and troops go by and feel the world is yours and you could do just about anything. The fact is that Mussolini saw a bandwagon going by and tried to jump on it, and they got run over.