The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008
Up Against 'the Finest Soldiers in the World'
Review By Max Hastings
The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
by Rick Atkinson
Henry Holt, 791 pp., $35.00
After World War II, when American and British
veterans were quizzed about which theaters
offered the most unpleasant experiences of
combat, the Pacific and Burma were agreed to be
the worst, but Italy ran them close. Far from
being a land of sun, wine, and cheery peasants
singing arias at their plows, it proved a hellish
battlefield where for two years men strove
against mud, mountains, malaria, and a
boundlessly ingenious enemy.
Worst of all, it became perceived as a place of
failure, where each small territorial gain was
achieved at such cost that talk of victory became
choked in ashes. Salerno, the Rapido, Anzio,
Cassino were names inscribed in blood and grief
in the annals of the American and British armies.
When the breakthrough to Rome belatedly came in
June 1944, it was promptly eclipsed in the
world's attention by D-day in Normandy.
"How do you like that?" exclaimed General Mark
Clark of the US Fifth Army with great bitterness.
"They didn't even let us have the newspaper
headlines... for one day." Correspondent Eric
Sevareid wrote likewise: "We had in a trice
become performers without an audience...a troupe
of actors who, at the climax of their play,
realize that the spectators have all fled out the
door."
In American minds, it was all the fault of the
British. Winston Churchill had insisted upon
assaulting that huge, damnable peninsula of
summits and rivers in the first place, against
the vehement objections of General George
Marshall and the US Army, who only wanted to go
to northwest Europe. It was Churchill who
conceived a landing at Anzio, Churchill who
persisted with fantasies of driving north into
the Balkans.
New York Review Books Classics
It is hard to overstate the rancor of many senior
American commanders toward their allies, for
getting them stuck with what they perceived as
the most thankless campaign of the war. Far from
being, as Britain's prime minister frequently
asserted, "the soft underbelly of Europe," Italy
as defended by Hitler's formidable General
"Smiling Albert" Kesselring proved rock and steel
all the way through.
The Day of Battle is the second volume of Rick
Atkinson's monu-mental history of the US Army's
western experience in World War II. It
chronicles, with all the verve, per-ception, and
insight for which he has become celebrated, the
painful advance of Allied forces from the beaches
of Sicily to the grand piazzas of Rome.
Atkinson cherishes no illusions about the US
Army's blooding in North Africa: "The first
eighteen months of war...had been characterized
by in-experience, insufficiency, and, all too
often, ineptitude. A long seasoning, still
unfinished, was required, a sorting out: of
strong from weak, effective from ineffective,
and, as always, lucky from unlucky."
In 1943 the Germans were still better than we
were, even after their calamitous defeat at
Stalingrad and the relentless hemorrhage of
losses in the East. Between the German surrender
in North Africa in May 1943 and D-day in June
1944, the Italian campaign represented the main
Anglo-American ground effort against Hitler. Yet
Kesselring contrived to contain it with a force
that seldom exceeded twenty-three divisions,
while Hitler never had fewer than 160 fighting
the Russians.
The key Allied strategic decisions were made at
the May 1943 Trident conference in Washington.
They represented compromises, as always, between
British and American aspirations. Churchill and
his army chief of staff, Sir Alan Brooke,
grudgingly bowed to the determination of
Roosevelt and Marshall to secure a firm
commitment to land in northern France on or
around May 1, 1944. The US, in its turn, acceded
to passionate British enthusiasm for a landing in
Sicily.
They agreed thereafter to pursue such operations
as seemed "best calculated to eliminate Italy
from the war and to contain the maximum number of
German forces." Strategic objectives remained
extraordinarily vague, chiefly because to make
them explicit would have laid bare Anglo-American
differences about the usefulness of Mediterranean
operations.
The British, desperately anxious to deflect the
desire of some Americans, notably Admiral Ernest
King of the US Navy, to shift the weight of
forces east to the Pacific, made rash predictions
that the Germans would not fight hard for Italy.
They suggested that in the long term, once
Eisenhower's forces began to be transferred north
for the Normandy landing, just nine divisions
should suffice for the Italian theater.
Though these prophecies were confounded, Atkinson
wisely remarks that Churchill's American critics
offered no alternative vision of where, if the
Allies did not go to Sicily and Italy, they might
instead engage the Germans until May 1944: "all
criticism of the Italian strategy butts against
an inconvenient riposte: if not Italy, where?"
It seemed impossible to imagine that with the
Russians fighting desperately every day of the
war, the American and British peoples would have
been content to see their armies do nothing
against the Germans for a year. After the
bruising experience of meeting Hitler's armies in
Tunisia, there were far fewer American advocates
of advancing D-day to 1943 than there had been in
1942. However ill-advised and ill-conducted later
operations were, the case for landing in Sicily
in 1943 and then moving into Italy still appears
persuasive to most historians, including Atkinson.
He is a superb painter of word portraits:
Across the great southern rim of the
Mediterranean they staged for battle, the farm
boys and the city boys, the foresters and the
steelworkers and at least one horse mill fixer.
Much of the American effort centered in Oran, two
hundred miles west of Algiers on the old Pirate
Coast, where billboards above the great port now
advertised Coca-Cola and Singer sewing-machines.
Eisenhower was, of course, to command Operation
Husky, as the Sicil-ian landing was code-named.
On him fell the chief strain of mitigating the
fact that, in John Gunther's words, "lots of
Americans and British have an atavistic dislike
of one another." Churchill's minister in the
Mediterranean, future prime minister Harold
Macmillan, observed that the general was "wholly
uneducated in any normal sense of the word," yet
"compared with the wooden heads and desiccated
hearts of many British soldiers I see here, he is
a jewel of broadmindedness and wisdom."
When the first Allied paratroopers began to land
in Sicily on the night of July 9, followed a few
hours later by the Anglo-American amphibious
force, Kesselring's defenses were pitifully weak.
His ten Italian divisions were under-strength,
poorly equipped, and unwilling to fight. Only the
four German formations on the island were ready,
as ever, to give their utmost.
It was fortunate that the struggle for the island
was so lopsided, that Allied strength was so
overwhelming, because Eisenhower's operations
were chaotic. Transport aircraft dropped
parachute forces piecemeal over hundreds of
square miles of land-and sea. Hundreds of
airborne soldiers died when their planes were
shot to pieces by reckless gunfire from the
invasion fleet as they made their approach. There
were several ugly incidents in which US troops
killed German prisoners in scores.
In some cases, inexcusably (and this was repeated
later in France), American commanders sanctioned
the execution of captured snipers, actual or
supposed. General George Patton wrote to George
Marshall that in his opinion, "these killings
have been thoroughly justified." He then
inflicted a devastating blow on his own career by
the notorious "slapping incidents," in which he
struck soldiers held in field hospitals with
combat fatigue. Atkinson notes, significantly,
that while many historians have been fascinated
by Patton's flamboyance, most of his own soldiers
recoiled in disgust.
As for the battlefield, "this is not tank
country," a soldier lamented, as he contemplated
an endless vista of rock and irrigation ditches.
A British soldier complained that Sicily was
"worse than the ****in' desert in every ****in'
way." Atkinson observes:
Here in Sicily was revealed a ground truth
that would obtain until the war's end twenty-two
months hence: on no battlefield did topography
dictate fate more than in vertical Italy.... A
Gefreiter [private] with Zeiss binoculars and a
field telephone could rain artillery on every
living creature in sight.
Throughout the campaign, the Germans possessed
the luxury of being able to remain immobile,
almost invisible, holding their ground-always
high ground. The onus of movement, exposure, and
attack rested unequivocally with the Allies-who
paid a full price in every plain and valley.
Sir Harold Alexander, the British senior ground
commander, failed to grasp the importance of
preventing the retreating Germans from making
their escape to Italy across the Straits of
Messina, an error in which Eisenhower, British
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and Patton must
also be deemed complicit. "Allied commanders had
had no coordinated plan for severing the Messina
Strait when HUSKY began," writes Atkinson, "nor
did any such plan emerge as the campaign reached
its climax. Inattention, even negligence, gave
Kesselring something his legions never had in
Tunisia: the chance for a clean getaway."
The Allies boasted of the 140,000 prisoners they
took in Sicily, but almost all of these were
Italian. The Germans lost over 4,000 dead there,
against 2,237 US fatal casualties and 2,721
British. A further 29,000 Allied soldiers were
wounded or hospitalized for sickness. Barely
50,000 Germans had held off almost half a million
invaders for five weeks.
If the Allies were undoubted victors, Kesselring
felt that he had gained "a clear sense of his
foes for future battles." The German commander
had hitherto harbored doubts about whether,
heavily outnumbered especially in the air, he
could hope to defend the Italian mainland. Now,
having observed the risk-averse behavior of
Allied commanders and the limitations of their
soldiers, he was much more confident. He
believed, justly, that he could inflict enormous
pain on the enemies of the Reich for every yard
of their advance up Italy.
On the evening of September 8, 1943, a fortnight
after completion of the capture of Sicily,
Eisenhower announced over Radio Algiers the
surrender of the Italian government, following
weeks of secret negotiations. If some senior
Americans still questioned the wisdom of moving
forces into Italy, Italian capitulation
emphasized the inevitability of the next move.
Early on September 9, American and British forces
under General Mark Clark landed at Salerno, on
the Italian west coast, while men of Montgomery's
Eighth Army disembarked further south, at the toe
of the peninsula.
At first, German resistance at Salerno was
slight. Troops got ashore in good order. Within
days, however, as Kesselring poured
reinforcements onto the battlefield, Salerno
became one of the bloodiest and most bitterly
contested struggles of the campaign. The only
saving grace of those days was that a mad plan to
land the US 82nd Airborne in Rome, to stage a
coup de main, was aborted at the last minute. Had
it gone ahead, there would have been a slaughter.
The German response to Italy's surrender was so
rapid, so ruthless, and so comprehensive that
there were no opportunities for quick, easy
Allied triumphs.
At Salerno, the Americans and British made
cardinal errors which were repeated later at
Anzio-but from which the lessons were mercifully
learned before D-day in Normandy. First, the air
forces failed systematically to destroy rail and
road communications to the battlefield, so that
the Germans were able to rush forces south.
Second, US reporter Don Whitehead noted in Sicily
the "sense of absolute confusion that falls over
every amphibious landing." The transfer of
soldiers from sea to land is not a mere
mechanical process, but one of the most complex
and difficult of all operations of war, during
which momentum is almost invariably lost when
troops advance inland.
Third, the establishment of an initial beachhead
is a significant achievement, but it is not
decisive. What matters more than anything is
which side wins "the battle of the build-up"-the
race to reinforce in the days and weeks following
invasion. This was the struggle which the Allies
came so close to losing at Salerno, with precious
little help from Montgomery's forces, which were
crawling painfully slowly northward despite
meeting little opposition.
Finally, at no stage in Italy did the Allied
command structure and personalities match the
simplicity and effectiveness of those of
Kesselring and his subordinates. Alexander, who
became senior Allied commander when Eisenhower
left the theater to command D-day, was a perfect
Irish military gentleman, adored by Churchill for
his poise, courage, and impeccable tailoring and
manners. His chief virtue, in Allied matters, was
that he made it his business to get along
tolerably well with Americans, as Montgomery did
not. His crippling vice was stupidity. He lacked
the intellectual capacity to plan beyond Friday.
Among the Americans, General Mark Clark of the
Fifth Army possessed an admirable mental
toughness in good times and bad, allied to
physical courage. But he hated and despised the
British, and possessed little tactical
imagination. He was notoriously obsessed with
personal glory, and his headquarters soon boasted
a fifty-strong public relations staff. Yet
Atkinson observes:
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.
If American suggestions that the British fought
less effectively than themselves were no more
justified than vice versa, Churchill's generals
in Italy inspired little confidence. Oliver
Leese, who took over the Eighth Army when
Montgomery returned to England, was another
unimpressive thinker. The performance of Clark's
and Leese's subordinates ranged from adequacy to
bungling. Lieutenant General Bernard C. "Spadger"
Freyberg, who led the New Zealand corps, had won
a Victoria Cross in World War I. He exemplified a
key principle about command appointments: any man
possessed of the suicidal courage required to win
a VC or Medal of Honor is unlikely to possess the
judgment or imagination to make much of a general.
By far the ablest Allied senior officer in Italy
was the French Marshal Al-phonse Juin, who
voluntarily dropped a star to avoid embarrassing
Clark by outranking him. Juin handled his forces
with a skill and shrewdness of the highest order,
though his French colonial troops became a byword
for brutality in the rear areas. It is hard to
overpraise the nuanced judgments of Atkinson on
the respective performances of Allied generals.
There is no hint of nationalism. He merely
dissects the actions of these often driven,
haunted men with sympathy for their dilemmas and
piercing insight on their shortcomings.
When the Allies at last prevailed at Salerno and
began to drive north, the Germans adopted the
tactics with which they persisted to the end of
the campaign: retreat from ridgeline to
ridgeline, each one defended with savage skill,
and attended by a large-scale program of
demolitions: "The scorching and salting of the
earth had begun," writes Atkinson.
Horses and mules were stolen or shot, and
even surplus saddles and horseshoe nails were put
to the torch. An estimated 92 percent of all
sheep and cattle in southern Italy, and 86
percent of all poultry, were taken or
slaughtered. "Rail rooters"-huge iron hooks
pulled behind locomotives-snapped railroad ties
like matchsticks. The echo of demolitions rolled
from the mountains, and oily smoke smudged the
northern skyline.
Alexander quipped: "All roads lead to Rome, but
all the roads are mined." By late October, amid
torrential rain in which vehicles bogged and men
shivered and squelched, he was obliged to report
to London that all hopes of a quick advance on
Rome were gone. With seven Allied divisions
dispatched to Britain to prepare for D-day, Italy
had become "a slogging match."
A Texan captain named Henry Waskow, who was
killed on December 14, 1943, after playing a
heroic part in one of innumerable hilltop
assaults, wrote a letter home opened by his
family after his death, which is quoted by
Atkinson:
I would have liked to have lived. But, since
God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much,
dear ones, for life in the other world must be
beautiful.... I will have done my share to make
this world a better place in which to live. Maybe
when the lights go on again all over the world,
free people can be happy and gay again.... If I
failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn't, it
was not because I did not try.
A host of men-American, British, Canadian,
Polish, New Zealanders, French-tried
extraordinarily hard at the Sangro and Rapido
River crossings; at Monte Cassino; and on a host
of lesser, now forgotten mountain battles of
1943-1944. Though it is true that their senior
commanders often lacked imagination, at root
there was never a realistic chance of achieving a
fast breakthrough amid the best terrain in the
world for defense; against the finest soldiers in
the world; and possessing a superiority of
numbers that was usually marginal rather than
decisive.
Command of the sea and air, which it seemed to
those in Washington and London should confer
immense advantage, counted for much less than the
Allied warlords hoped. It was Winston Churchill
who conceived the vision of a bold amphibious
thrust at Anzio, just south of Rome and well
north of the Cassino battlefield, to break the
stalemate. By sheer force of personality, at a
time when Allied generals conceded that they
themselves had run out of ideas, he imposed the
project upon the Anglo-American command.
Relations between the Allies had plumbed bottom.
On the eve of the January 1944 crossing of the
Rapido River, US corps commander Geoffrey Keyes
wrote in his diary: "God forbid we ever have to
serve with or near the British again.... Clark
insists we are not being sold down the river but
I am not convinced." When the Anzio landing began
on January 22, it was the turn of the British to
complain. They considered the US commander John
Lucas to be an incompetent old man.
Having taken the Germans by surprise, Lucas sat
his troops down on the shoreline and allowed
Kesselring to rush forces from all over Italy to
contain the perimeter. Thereafter, at Anzio the
British shared with the Americans one of the most
unpleasant experiences of the war, through months
of frustration and shocking losses.
The senior British airman in the Mediterranean,
Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, wrote to a
colleague in London five days after the landing:
I have not the slightest doubt that if we had
been Germans or Russians landing at Anzio, we
should have had [Highway 6] two days ago and
maybe Rome by now and the whole right of the
enemy line opposite the Fifth Army would have
crumpled.
That Lucas was a weak commander is probably true.
Clark was right to sack him, at Alexander's
urging, when the Anzio battle relapsed into
bloody stalemate, and Lucas retired to his
bunker. But Rick Atkinson will have none of the
argument that the Allies could have triumphed had
they dashed headlong for Rome after the initial
landing:
More than sixty years after the Allied
perdition at Anzio, Lucas's caution seems
sensible and even inevitable, given Clark's wooly
instructions and Alexander's hail-fellow
approbation.
Churchill's original idea of landing at Anzio was
inspired. But no strategic concept can be judged
sound or otherwise in abstract terms. Everything
hinges upon what resources are available to
execute it. Given the limited Allied forces in
the Mediterranean and the paucity of landing
ships to move them after the removal of most
amphibious shipping to prepare for D-day,
Alexander could not have put ashore a sufficient
army to change the Italian campaign-unless the
Germans panicked.
This they almost never did. Alexander wrote
ruefully to Brooke in March during the long, long
struggle for Monte Cassino: "Unfortunately we are
fighting the best soldiers in the world-what
men!" I remember one of Montgomery's commanders
in northwest Europe telling me many years ago:
"The Germans punished mistakes -always." If a
British or American force exposed a flank, failed
to secure an objective against counterattack, or
stuck out a neck too far, the Germans noticed-and
acted. It is not too fanciful to compare the
likely consequences of an Allied dash for Rome
from Anzio in January 1944 with what happened in
the Netherlands at Arnhem in September that year.
Excessive boldness was met by an amazingly rapid
and brutal German response, as it would have been
in Italy.
Four months of siege war at Anzio was a ghastly
experience for the combatants. But its final
outcome-deliverance and the capture of Rome on
June 4 by Mark Clark's army-was surely preferable
to the extinc-tion of the Allied landing force.
This Kesselring's forces could indeed have
achieved, had Lucas's columns exposed a long
salient in attempting to seize the Italian
capital.
Atkinson concurs with the longstanding view that
after the breakthrough in late May 1944 Clark
willfully ignored the possibility of cutting off
the retreating German armies, to gain the
personal glory of capturing Rome. He writes:
With duplicity and in bad faith, Clark
contravened a direct order from a superior
officer. His assertion...that the British "are
scheming to get into Rome the easiest way," was
predicated on no substantive evidence.
The author retains some doubts, however, about
whether even if the Fifth Army had made an
all-out attempt at encirclement, this would have
succeeded. Kesselring's forces, masters of the
disciplined retreat, were able to retire swiftly
northward, to fight another day and indeed almost
another year.
Most Americans found the Italian people doubtful
of the virtues of the crusade for their soil.
"They hate Mussolini, the Germans, and I believe
they hate us," wrote Lieutenant Ivar Aas to his
parents in Minneapolis. "I don't think they go
for this liberation idea too well." Given the
appalling destruction of their land by all the
warring parties, the rapes, pillage, and casual
killings of which Allied soldiers were not
guiltless, this is unsurprising.
The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy, which
finally ended in May 1945, cost 312,000 Allied
casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied
losses in the decisive campaign to liberate
northwest Europe that began in Normandy in June
1944. Three quarters of a million US troops
served at some time in Italy, suffering 120,000
battle casualties including 23,501 killed.
The fate of those who made such sacrifices left a
sour taste among the survivors, because they
perceived themselves as having received
infinitely less honor and laurels for their share
of victory than did the invaders of Normandy. "We
are the D-day dodgers, in sunny Italee!" sang
British soldiers of the Eighth Army, with bitter
irony and no little resentment, as they
contemplated the sea of mud and misery in which
they fought most of their campaign.
Atkinson's book is a model of historical
narrative and analysis. His accounts of the great
battles evoke in vivid detail the horrors endured
by the participants. I find it hard to quibble
with any of his judgments. This is not least
because he understands so wonderfully well the
doubts and difficulties of the men of 1943-1944.
He does not seek, as do too many historians, to
impose upon them the values and perspective of
the twenty-first century.
Atkinson, like Douglas Porch in his splendid 2004
study Hitler's Mediterranean Gamble, believes
that while the Italian campaign was a horrible
mess, it is hard to see at what stage the Allies
could or should have got out of it. The British
public, especially, was profoundly embarrassed
that the Russians were doing so much to defeat
Hitler, while the British and US armies seemed to
be doing so little.
A D-day in Normandy in 1942 or 1943 would have
been a disaster. Invading Italy sustained, at a
cost that seemed heavy to the Western democracies
though trivial to Stalin's Russia, a serviceable
and indeed important legend of Anglo-American
participation in the ground struggle against
Hitler until the cross-Channel Operation Overlord
could take place. The British historian Professor
Sir Michael Howard, himself a veteran of the
Italian campaign, often remarks: "We make war as
we can, rather than as we should." This was
profoundly true of the Italian campaign, which
Rick Atkinson chronicles with glittering
distinction.
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