UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

days short of H-hour. However, the plan appealed to Winston Churchill, who was just then meeting at Carthage with Generals Alexander and Eisenhower, whom he swept along with his vision of a bigger Shingle to cut off the Germans’ supply lines to the mountains to the south and liberate Rome in one stroke.

The Prime Minister threw himself into his latest enthusiasm, and President Roosevelt agreed reluctantly on December 28 to a further delay in shifting shipping to Britain for the Normandy invasion, the specter of which understandably gave the PM the willies. Alexander and Montgomery, jealously guarding the Mediterranean Theater as a British prerogative on behalf of the boss as if in the days of Empire, were convinced the Germans couldn’t handle a two-front war in Italy, and Clark—stuck in the Winter Line, put down by the Brits and hungry for the redemption and glory that would come his way with the liberation of Rome—was ordered to revive Shingle, in corps strength this time, for around January 20. That allowed only three weeks for planning.

In one of those fortunes of war, General John P. Lucas, who’d succeeded Dawley as Clark’s Sixth Corps commander after Salerno, was haunted by nightmares of being pushed back to the sea by the Panzers at Salerno. Older, cautious by nature, having a weakness (suspect in a general) for sparing his men, and faced with insufficient forces, guns, landing craft and time for planning and rehearsal, he confessed to his diary that he “felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter.”³

Like Salerno but more so, this latest objective was a plain overlooked by semicircular hills—here the Alban Hills, which were traversed by the main supply route of the Germans to the Winter Line—that must be wrested from the enemy as the first objective. Yet Lucas’s recurrent Salerno nightmare bade him first build up the strength to repel the inevitable German counterattack before pushing forward to this high ground. Knowing his military history, he bemoaned to his diary on January 10 that “this whole affair had a strong odor of Gallipoli and apparently the same amateur was still on the coach’s bench.”⁴

The nervous general was referring to the strategy embraced by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in January 1915, when the Brits mounted an amphibious landing at Gallipoli on the western shore of the Dardanelles designed to divert the Turks from their pressure on the Russians in the Caucasus. A test of the British contention that an offensive against the Central Powers in the Balkans stood a greater chance of success than an outright assault on the Western Front, it cost 100,000 casualties before it was abandoned, a classic case of incompetent execution more than faulty strategy in the view of most historians— including Churchill.

The Anzio assault would be made by our Third Division, which had been resting and replenishing since it was relieved on the Winter Line on November 17 by the rested and replenished 36th; an armored battalion; a paratroop regiment and battalion; two battalions of Rangers; and the veteran British First Division, with a regiment of tanks and two Commando battalions. This was the largest possible waterborne force with the available landing craft that would have to return to Naples and load up the 45th Division and most of the First Armored for the second round.