Battle of Anzio

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Anzio began on the 22nd of January 1944, when Allied forces waded ashore at a strip of reclaimed marshland on the Italian coast, hoping to outflank an entire German defensive line and seize Rome. Thirteen Allied soldiers were killed in the initial landings. Nine German prisoners were taken for every Allied soldier who fell that morning. A jeep patrol drove so far inland it reached the outskirts of Rome. By every early measure, Operation Shingle had achieved the impossible: complete surprise against one of the war's most capable commanders. So why did it take another four and a half months to capture the city?

  The answer lies in a series of decisions made in the hours after that deceptively easy dawn. Who hesitated when boldness was the only viable option? Who understood the danger and said nothing? And when the Allies finally broke free of the beachhead, why did one American general's ambition cost the campaign its defining strategic prize? Those are the questions this story sets out to answer.

• 2. The Trap on the Shore

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  Winston Churchill was lying in bed recovering from pneumonia in Marrakesh in December 1943 when he first sketched out the concept. Two divisions, landed at Anzio, bypassing the German lines at Monte Cassino, and Rome would fall. By February he was writing to his commanders, accusing them of preferring to draw pay and eat rations rather than fight.

  The geography made the plan both tempting and treacherous. The Anzio beachhead sat at the northwestern tip of what had been the Pontine Marshes, a vast lowland only recently drained and settled under Benito Mussolini's reclamation projects. Mussolini had built canals and pumping stations in the 1930s to convert the malarial flats into farmland, planting stone houses and founding five new cities. Mountains surrounded the reclaimed plain on every side except the sea: the Monti Albani, the Monti Lepini, the Monti Ausoni, and the Monti Aurunci to the south.

  Anyone who seized those mountains after a landing could look down on everything below. Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, commanding the U.S. Fifth Army, grasped this plainly. An amphibious force that failed to move inland quickly would be trapped on the flat ground while the defenders occupied the heights. Clark understood the risk. He did not pass his understanding on to his subordinate, Major General John P. Lucas, who commanded U.S. VI Corps and who would lead the landing.

  Lucas had already written in his diary, a few days before the operation, that he expected to go ashore with inadequate forces and end up in a serious jam. He compared the plan to Gallipoli, describing its architect as an amateur who was still on the coach's bench. The amateur he meant could only have been Churchill himself, who had overseen the disastrous Dardanelles landings of the First World War. The men who would carry out Operation Shingle were walking into it with their eyes wide open and their confidence thin.

• 3. The Missed Hours

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  At 03:00 on the 22nd of January, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was woken with news of the landings. His contingency planning had covered this exact coastline. Within two hours he had ordered the Kampfgruppe of the 4th Parachute Division and the Hermann Göring Fallschirm Panzer Division to block the roads from Anzio to the Alban Hills. By the end of that first day he expected some 20,000 defending troops to be in position. By the 24th of January, over 40,000 German troops were dug into prepared defensive positions around the beachhead.

  Lucas, meanwhile, poured more men and material into his tiny bridgehead. He strengthened his defenses. By midnight on the 22nd, 36,000 soldiers and 3,200 vehicles had landed, but they stayed close to the shore. Churchill later captured the failure in a single image: he had hoped to hurl a wildcat onto the shore, but all he got was a stranded whale.

  The military historian John Keegan would later write that Lucas might well have reached Rome if he had rushed his spearheads inland on the first day, though they would have been crushed soon after. But by waiting until his position felt sufficiently consolidated, Lucas achieved, in Keegan's judgment, the worst of both worlds: exposing his forces to risk without imposing any on the enemy.

  Kesselring also used the pause to flood the reclaimed marshland again. His engineers stopped the drainage pumps that Mussolini had built and let saltwater back into the canals. He intended to entrap the Allied forces and destroy them by epidemic. From the hills his artillery had a clear view of every Allied position, and a steady rain of shells began falling on the beach, the harbor, and everything in between, with little distinction between front lines and supply areas.

• 4. Cisterna and the Rangers

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  On the 30th of January, Lucas initiated a two-pronged attack. One force aimed at Highway 7 at Cisterna di Latina before moving east into the Alban Hills. Another pushed northeast up the Via Anziate toward Campoleone. Both attacks ran into fierce resistance.

  The worst outcome fell on the Rangers. Ahead of the main assault on the right, two Ranger battalions made a covert night advance toward Cisterna, expecting to arrive before dawn. Faulty intelligence had failed to account for what was waiting for them. When daylight came, they were surrounded and cut off, engaged by elements of the Fallschirm-Panzer Division Hermann Göring. A brutal close-quarters battle followed. Of the 767 men in the 1st and 3rd Ranger Battalions, only six made it back to the Allied lines. The other 761 were killed or captured.

  On the left, the British 1st Division fought hard up the Via Anziate but failed to take Campoleone and ended the day holding an exposed salient stretching up the road. That salient would become the focus of the German counterattacks in February.

  By late January, Allied forces on the beachhead had grown to 69,000 men, 508 guns, and 208 tanks. The total defending Germans had risen to 71,500. The window for exploitation had closed, and both sides settled into the grinding arithmetic of attrition.

• 5. Operation Fischfang

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  On the 16th of February, Germany launched Operation Fischfang, a major offensive down the line of the Via Anziate supported by Tiger tanks. The 167th Brigade of the recently arrived 56th (London) Division was overrun. X and Y Companies of the 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, each starting from around 125 men, were reduced to a single officer and 10 other ranks each.

  One of the men killed that day was Second Lieutenant Eric Waters of the Royal Fusiliers. His son Roger Waters, who would later co-found Pink Floyd, wrote "When the Tigers Broke Free" in memory of his father and drew on his death for the 1982 film Pink Floyd: The Wall.

  By the 18th of February, after desperate fighting, the Allies' Final Beachhead Line was under attack. The 1st Battalion, Loyal Regiment lost a company overrun and suffered 200 casualties in a single day. Major-General Ronald Penney, commanding the British 1st Division, was wounded by shellfire. For a time the division was commanded by Major-General Gerald Templer of the 56th Division.

  What stopped Fischfang was artillery. Allied guns outshot the German artillery by roughly ten to one, breaking up attacks by targeting German assembly areas before attacks could form. By the 20th of February, the offensive petered out with both sides exhausted. During the fighting, both sides had suffered nearly 20,000 casualties each since the first landings, a density of destruction that some described as the highest in the entire Italian campaign. On the 18th of February, a light cruiser returning to Anzio was struck by two torpedoes and sunk, with a loss of 417 men.

  Major William Sidney of the 5th Battalion, Grenadier Guards, was later awarded the Victoria Cross for his leadership of British counterattacks during this period.

• 6. Clark's Choice

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  Lucas was replaced on the 22nd of February by Major General Lucian Truscott, who had commanded the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division since the early days of the landings. Truscott spent the following weeks planning Operation Buffalo, a breakout designed to cut Route 6 at Valmontone and trap the German Tenth Army retreating north from Cassino.

  At 05:45 on the 23rd of May 1944, 1,500 Allied artillery pieces opened bombardment. The breakout began. In the first day's fighting the 1st Armored Division lost 100 tanks, and the 3rd Infantry Division suffered 955 casualties. By the afternoon of the 25th of May, Cisterna had finally fallen after house-by-house fighting that had virtually wiped out the German 362nd Infantry Division. Elements of the 1st Armored Division were within three miles of Valmontone, within reach of closing the trap on seven German divisions.

  Then, on the evening of the 25th of May, Truscott received new orders from Clark. The main axis of attack was to shift 90 degrees to the northwest, toward Rome. Truscott wrote later that he was dumbfounded. He wrote that there had never been any doubt in his mind that, had Clark held to Alexander's instructions and not changed the direction of the attack on the 26th of May, the strategic objectives of Anzio would have been accomplished in full. He called the capture of Rome a poor compensation for the lost opportunity.

  Clark had recorded his own reasoning plainly. He wrote that his forces not only wanted the honor of capturing Rome, but felt they deserved it, and that he intended to ensure people at home knew it was the Fifth Army that did the job. On the 2nd of June the Caesar C Line collapsed, and Rome was entered in the early hours of the 4th of June. Clark held an impromptu press conference on the steps of the Town Hall on the Capitoline Hill that morning. He stationed military police at road junctions to keep British troops out of the city.

  Two days later, the fall of Rome was pushed off the front pages by reports from Normandy.

• 7. The Ledger

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  The battle cost 24,000 U.S. and 10,000 British casualties. Because the German Tenth Army was allowed to withdraw intact through the Valmontone gap, seven of its divisions rejoined Kesselring's forces north of Rome, regrouped, and fell back to the Gothic Line. The Allied campaign in Italy continued until the war in Europe ended.

  Churchill, in Volume 5 of his memoir The Second World War, implied that Lucas bore primary responsibility through excessive caution. Kesselring, after the war, offered a colder verdict. He said the landing force was initially only a division or so of infantry, without armor, and that was the basic error: a halfway measure of an offensive.

  The operation did produce one outcome Churchill stressed: after the Anzio landings, the German High Command dropped its plans to transfer five of Kesselring's best divisions from Italy to northwestern Europe. That decision benefited Operation Overlord, launched two days after the fall of Rome.

  Among those who fought at Anzio was Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist whose Willie and Joe drawings appeared in the American Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. Audie Murphy, who would become the most decorated U.S. combat soldier in American military history, served with Company B, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division at Anzio. James Arness, later known for the television series Gunsmoke, was severely wounded on the Anzio front line, leaving him with a lifelong limp. Denis Healey, who later served as British Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the Military Landing Officer for the British assault brigade. Daniel Inouye, future president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, served at Anzio with the segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

  Raleigh Trevelyan, who was twice wounded at Anzio, wrote afterward a memoir called The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After. The intelligence officer Hamish Henderson heard a tune called "The Bloody Fields of Flanders" in the trenches there, and later set to it the Scottish anthem "Freedom Come-All-Ye." The battle worked its way into memory through many channels, and one of the last voices to characterize it plainly was the war correspondent Alan Whicker, who called Clark's decision to turn from Valmontone toward Rome the worst vainglorious blunder of the entire war.