UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

As the assault forces were practicing landings—the Yanks above Naples, the Brits around Salerno—the weather turned foul, and the Navy dared not close in on the beaches in the heavy seas. Forty-three Third Division landing craft were swamped, an undisclosed number of men drowned, and about thirty artillery pieces were lost. A bad omen.

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On the night of January 20, two days before the landings behind the German lines at Anzio twenty-six miles below Rome, the grand strategy called for the 36th Division to breach the Winter Line with a crossing of the swift-flowing, steep-banked and dominatingly defended Rapido River, six miles west of ill-fated San Pietro. Thus with a one-two punch, according to the script, the Germans would be fighting a two-front war in Italy. The trouble was that practically every square inch of the 36th’s sector on the Winter Line was under the scrutiny of the German observers on Monte Cassino.

So for the third time under Generals Clark and Walker the dice were loaded against the Texans. They walked and swam into a trap and were drowned and cut to pieces. In two days the hapless division suffered 1,681 casualties, including 500 captured.

H-hour for the landing at Anzio was two in the morning of January 22. To gain surprise, air strikes effectively grounded enemy air surveillance, and instead of a softening-up naval bombardment, a dummy operation was directed at Civitavecchia sixty-five miles farther up the coast. A heavy rocket barrage preceded the landing. The defenders had evacuated and had nothing but an understrength battalion of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division blowing up the waterfront, a few tanks and some artillery in the area.

The landing was close to a total surprise, and by late the next day the British on the left and Americans (by then including the 45th’s 179th Regiment) on the right, virtually unopposed, had reached the predetermined line, about seven miles inland and fifteen wide from shore to shore, that was the most the initial force was expected to be able to hold. There, instead of lancing combat patrols into the undefended Alban Hills to cut the enemy lifelines to the southern front, they were ordered by General Lucas, haunted by his close shave at Salerno, to wait for reinforcements.

On the day of the invasion the 157th and 180th were alerted to move to a staging area at Naples, and I rejoiced over radio reports that Shingle was already ten miles inland and had “trapped two Panzer Divisions while the Air Corps bombed hell out of them. [Somebody’s fabrication, of course.] Events have taken a wonderful turn. Perhaps we’re going to hit the South of France.”

Not for two more days did Lucas feel ready to get on the move again, and by then it was too late. Amazed at his enemy’s failure to push on with a good chance of taking Rome and cutting off the south, Kesselring had elements of eight German divisions rushing in and brought General von Mackensen’s 14th Army headquarters down from the north to manage the containment. Shingle was stopped in its tracks before it ever got reshingled.