In the fraught WWII autumn of 1943, Winston Churchill caught pneumonia from traveling too much, staying up too late talking too much, smoking too many cigars, eating and drinking too much. His doctor told him he had to rest. Since he was already in North Africa he zipped over to balmy Morocco to lay low and recuperate.
World War II was in its fourth year since the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. Italy was falling apart militarily; Mussolini had been more-or-less ousted in July of 1943 and moved offstage to an Italian island. Russia was steamrollering Nazi soldiers out of Russia. (According to Wikipedia, twenty-seven million Russian soldiers and civilians were killed during the German invasion of Russian. One million German soldiers lost their lives.)
It seemed pretty clear that Nazis would eventually lose the war but that day wasn’t going to arrive until there had been a whole lot more war. Can we ever look at this dynamic with enough disgust? What is more dangerously stubborn than arrogant men who play at macho by sending others to fight and die for them?
There would have to be an invasion of the Allies into Europe. The colossal military/political question thus became, where and when that would happen? Americans lobbied for France. Churchill agreed, though first, as he advocated from his balmy villa in Marrakesh, they should invade Sicily and Italy. Americans were not convinced this should happen. Italy was complicated, hilly, craggy, filled with poverty, suspicions, and embedded Germans. However, Eisenhower (and others, always there were others) was trying to not just win the war but to do it in some kind of collaborative accord with all the Allies.
Imagine coordinating the baking of ten thousand cookies in one ordinary kitchen with seven cooks from seven different cultures. The kicker being that if you don’t plan it well - people will die. WWII was too many cooks and yet, without the resources of each other, no one would succeed alone.
Churchill lobbied hard for the invasion of Italy. There were hours of discussion. Leaders tried to not yell because they knew, aggravating as it was, they had to stick together.
In the end they agreed to do what Churchill wanted. Some of those planning leaders said it would be easy because Mussolini was out of power. Some experts insisted Italians would have no heart to collaborate with the Germans who still violently occupied their homeland. Italy is a smallish. Tying up Germans in Italy would keep them busy while Allies organized to invade France next year. It made some sense.
Here is where I mention that my dad was one of the 300,000 Allied troops shipped to Sicily and Italy in 1943-1944. The photo of the guy smiling while he holds puppies – that’s my dad, Wilman Danielson, in Italy. He died of a heart attack when I was a still a kid so I barely heard his stories. I guess that’s why, all these decades later, I’m reading “The Day of Battle” by Rick Atkinson. It’s a fiercely compelling 600-page tome about the Allied invasion of Sicily/Italy. I trip over the names and numbers of military divisions but the tale itself is never tedious.
What I’m learning is what those of you who are history buffs likely already know. The men who planned, orchestrated, and carried out WWII were mostly ego-driven, fairly (but not always) smart, courageous white men. Many had been soldiers during WWI so they were aware of what it’s like to be a soldier in a war. We admire them now because it was so long ago and “we won.”
Up close, watching their acrimony, arrogance, and bullheaded determination to send young guys to overpower and rout other young guys – it astounds me how dangerous, loud, and impossible it was.
In August, the Allies invaded Sicily. In September, they crossed from Sicily into Italy. The American 5th Army was led by General Mark Clark who, almost everyone agrees, was sometimes good and brave, but often seemed more interested in his own glory than the success and welfare of his men. When things went wrong (it was a war) he blamed others.
The 8th Army was British, led by General Bernard Montgomery who was touchy, held grudges, and believed Americans were not as tough as Brits. He occasionally did not do what collaborative plans said to do; he’d move his guys differently so they could get to an end goal before the Americans. This, as you can imagine, made him no BFF’s among the Americans. Then again, General Clark did the same when he could get away with it.
I absolutely hate that these two empowered men were ‘working their careers’ while thousands upon thousands of soldiers and Italian civilians’ lives were at stake.
It was January when Churchill (and many others) directed Clark and Montgomery to cross the Winter Line to rout the Germans who were hunkered in. The Winter Line was a waistbelt across the middle of the boot of Italy that bisected the nation with valleys and intertwining rivers that tumbled from the Apennines mountains. The Apennines ran up and down (north and south) the boot of Italy like the Rockies or Appalachians do in the US. They are smaller than our mountains, but are famous for rocky crevices, caves, abutments, and terrain that would stymy a goat.
By that winter of 1944, the Nazis had been in Italy for years and thus were ensconced in that terrain. They’d built bunkers from which they could easily shoot down into the meandering valleys. They’d placed tens of thousands of mines in the marshes and along the riverbanks.
The Winter Line’s Gari river (usually called the Rapido when people talk about this battle, though apparently that’s the wrong name) would become the site of an assault by Americans that started January 20. They started at dusk so, the planners said, it would be harder for the Germans to see them. Mine sweeping soldiers had been through the area several days before but there were still mines. Americans were assigned to cross the river at the mouth of the Liri Valley – which was directly below four hundred embedded German guns and rocket launchers. Americans were supposed to ford the river, then fight their way up, into, and eventually over the mountains. This offensive, the planning leaders said, would help clear the path of the Allies to Rome. It would also keep thousands of German soldiers occupied so that a different Allied assault along the seacoast at Anzio would have a better chance of succeeding. This plan was nuts.
One of the units was U.S. 36th Infantry Division led by Major General Fred Walker. The division had started as a Texan division but over the months since Sicily, 60% of those men had been lost to casualty and death. Thousands of replacement soldiers were sent in the few days before the assault at Rapido/Gari . Most of those replacements had little to no training relevant to crossing a river or climbing a mountain. Bazooka teams were sent with men who had never fired a bazooka. The regulars had, along the way, stripped their stripes from their uniforms in order to protect themselves from identification by Germans. This meant new guys didn’t know the ranks or expertise of the guys they would fight next to.
Fred Walker was anxious. In his diary he wrote to himself that they would need miracles if they were going to succeed.
From The Day of Battle, pg. 339. “At 7:30 PM sixteen artillery battalions opened fire in gusts of white flame. … more than a thousand shells per minute shrieked overhead…” Dozens of both rubber dinghies and plywood scows had been hidden in one locale for the Americans to pull from under camouflage, haul to the deep and fast running river, then paddle across. But German artillery had, that very afternoon, fired so many rounds down into the valley that half the rubber boats had holes. The plywood boats weighed five hundred pounds each and had to be carried by soldiers, who were also carrying their guns, all their ammo, and all the other equipment they would need. They were supposed to carry those boats along a narrow road beside the river, while Germans, who could see the dark shadows in the night, blasted volleys of fire down upon them.
The Texan 36th was one of several divisions trying to cross the river that night. Nothing went right. One group got lost and had to backtrack. “Paddles, rifles, and human limbs rained across the road.” The white tape that minesweepers had used to delineate safe places to walk had seemed too visible so they’d switched to brown cord - at night those cords were impossible to see. Men stumbled onto mines and, “It’s pretty hard when you are dying to keep quiet.” And thus Germans up in the hills and crags were even more informed of where the Americans were.
That night was brutal. By early the next day leaders realized hundreds of soldiers had been killed, thousands wounded, and only a few men made it across the river. Those men were so precariously positioned that they were ordered to come back.
Soldiers, the ones who were the actual “boots on the ground,” knew this battle plan would never work. Yet the next evening they were sent into it again. They didn’t know they’d actually been weirdly successful because they DID keep two German panzer units occupied so they couldn’t make their way to Anzio.
Official medical records of those two nights listed 2019 causalities, more than half were deaths. Later General Clark, defending himself, would accuse Major General Walker of “inflating” those numbers in a bid for sympathy. The Germans found 430 American bodies and took 770 prisoners. German losses were sixty-four dead and 179 wounded. A captured American carrier pigeon flew back to its American Corps with a German message attached to its leg that read, “We look forward to your next visit.”
A company commander reported, “I had 184 men. Forty-eight hours later I had seventeen.”
So many men died that after the war there would be an investigation though in the end no one was charged with anything.
A Brigadier from New Zealand who weighed in on the reports wrote, “Nothing was right except the courage.”
…
War. What is it good for?
Yeah, you got that right. War is good for absolutely nothing.
But if our leaders are going to launch our young men and women into it, by all that is holy, they ought to plan it before they start it.
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