Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9308290308
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SID MOODY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Once before - in the sixth century by the Byzantine general Belisarius - had Rome been captured by an army attacking from the south.
The reason was simple: mountains after mountains after mountains.
That the Allies of World War II did so on June 4, 1944, was a triumph of will over geography, misery, blundering and a tenacious German army that turned the vaulting crags of Italy's spine into shooting galleries.
That the American 5th Army under Lt. Gen. Mark Clark was in Italy at all was a grudging concession to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The Briton was forever seeking a back door into Hitler's Third Reich, a "soft underbelly." Soon after, the initial Anglo-American landing on Sept. 9, 1943, near Salerno, Italy, proved to be anything but.
Supporters of the invasion hoped it would draw Nazi forces away from the beleaguered Russian front and from the upcoming Allied landing in Normandy. It did. But it also tied up a million Allied soldiers, vital landing craft and, in American eyes, became a sideshow to the main event, the invasion of France.
As the fighting inched through the freezing mountains, it was a question in the mind of the Allied ground commander, Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, as to whose troops were tying down whom that might be fighting elsewhere.
Checked by the Germans' Gustav Line centered on the glowering heights of Monte Cassino, the Allies tried an end run in January 1944 by landing at Anzio 40 miles south of Rome. The hope was to cut Field Marshal Albert Kesselring's supply lines and force a German withdrawal. Instead, Anzio became a stalemate which failed to relieve another stalemate.
"To attempt [a landing] with only two divisions was to send a boy on a man's errand," says the U.S. official history. Within a week, Kesselring's force outnumbered the invaders, almost threw them into the sea and then settled into trench warfare that closely resembled that of World War I.
No part of the beachhead was beyond range of German artillery, notably huge 280mm railroad cannon far to the rear. Regular as clockwork enemy artillery claimed 100 casualties a day. Only Allied air supremacy and naval gunfire made Anzio tenable.
Both sides were implacably dug in. An attack by 767 British Rangers in one foray saw only six come back. The Allies formed the 1st Special Service Force, a band of 2,500 American and Canadian misfits, congenital evaders of the law and adventurists. They infiltrated German lines at night, leaving stickers on the helmets of their dead victims: "The worst is yet to come."
To the south, Americans, Indians and then New Zealanders stormed Monte Cassino. All were repulsed in turn. The ancient Benedictine monastery atop the mountain was bombed into ruin, producing a controversy but not victory.
Kesselring, a master of tactical defense, wondered why the Allies did not mass their forces for a breakout instead of attacking piecemeal. Later historians have wondered, too.
While the huge buildup of Allied forces crowded into England for D-Day in Normandy, Alexander was building up his own army. Sixteen nations fought in the motley force: Brazilians, Poles, Senegalese, Gurkhas from Nepal. The Goumiers from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco were particularly adept in Italy, honing their long knives by day and stalking through the Appenine Mountains by night, slitting German throats. One satisfied an officer's request for a German watch by bringing back a whole arm with timepiece attached.
At Anzio, the original commander, Maj. Gen. John P. Lucas, a leader "full of inertia," had been replaced by American Maj. Gen. Lucien K. Truscott Jr. "No sonofabitch, no commander," was his credo. He wore a .45 on his hip, insisted on fresh flowers daily in his headquarters and drove his highly trained men in the 5 mph "Truscott Trot."
Every day he moved tanks up to bombard the Germans, then hid them near the front lines in preparation for a breakout. The Germans didn't catch on. Alexander began massing his men and tanks in front of the Liri Valley and its ancient Via Casilina that led to Rome.
Clark, who always traveled with a phalanx of photographers and public relations aides, was focused on one goal: the glory of taking Rome, the first capital of the Axis powers to fall. At one point he threatened to shoot any soldiers who got to the Eternal City before his Americans. This fixation led to one of the war's most argued decisions.
While the Goumiers and American alpine troops scrambled through the mountains and Poles began the fourth and finally successful assault on Monte Cassino, Alexander's main force broke into the Liri Valley on May 11, 1944. Kesselring abandoned the Gustav Line. Then Truscott barged out of Anzio and headed inland to cut off Kesselring.
But to Clark that was not the prize. Rome was. He ordered Truscott to hook a left to Rome, leaving a path for the German retreat.
"Dumbfounded," Truscott protested. In vain. To the Allies' subsequent regret, Kesselring got away to fight another day.
On May 25, Capt. Ben Souza was leading a patrol south from Anzio and bumped into Lt. Francis Buckley, an engineer who was inspecting a bridge.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?" Souza challenged.
"I'm trying to make contact with Anzio," Buckley replied.
"Boy, you've made it!"
After 125 days and 22,400 Allied casualties, the Anzio stalemate was broken.
The 5th Army pressed on to Rome. In the city an American nun recalled the German flight: "Wild-eyed, unshaven, unkempt [men] on foot, in stolen cars, in horse-drawn vehicles, even carts belonging to the street-cleaning department . . . handsome motor cars with Fascist dignitaries looking anything but dignified in their anxiety to get away.. . . They were frightened."
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Keyes of the U.S. II Corps explained why Clark was in such a rush: "France is going to be invaded, and we've got to get this in the papers before then."
Brig. Gen. Robert Frederick, head of the Special Forces guerrillas who had just been wounded for his ninth Purple Heart, told Keyes that German artillery in Rome was holding him up. "This will not do, " said Keyes. "General Clark must be across the city limits by 14 o'clock because he has to have a photograph taken."
"Give me an hour," Frederick said.
Clark got his photo. The road to Rome had cost 20,839 lives, 11,292 of them American. They lay buried back down the newly bloodied ancient Roman roads, latest in a long line of fallen conquerors who had never reached the Eternal City from the south. But the living Willies and Joes, made immortal in Sgt. Bill Mauldin's sardonic cartoons, had.
by CNB