Whicker’s War and Journey of a Lifetime. Alan Whicker
hoard film stock for the excitement of bringing freedom to the first Axis capital. As soon as I could get my jeep ashore I started up the Via Anziate heading for Rome, with any luck, and those first triumphant pictures. We were some 60 miles ahead of the German army, which for some reason after all our backs-to-the-wall battles seemed rather hilarious. I resisted the euphoric desire to drive fast through the open countryside, singing.
The flat farmland seemed deserted, yet I could hear sounds of battle … After some miles I was beginning to suspect the Seven Hills of Rome must be just around the corner. Then at a road junction before the River Moletta some Sherman tanks were hull-down behind a fly-over, firing over it. The supporting 1st Battalion of the Loyals had been held up by enemy fire. Snipers’ bullets hissed past as we watched the shelling they had called down on to enemy-held houses.
That was to be the limit of our advance upon Rome. I did not foresee we had walked into a death trap and would be fighting for our lives for eighteen desperate weeks.
The Germans’ reaction had been swift and almost overwhelming. As usual, they were surprised but not panicked, though Hitler – always keen on other people fighting to the death – was taking our assault landing personally. He appreciated the propaganda impact of such an invasion and his reaction would resonate from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in Berlin to the beaches of Anzio.
Reserve divisions were rushed-in from around Italy and Yugoslavia, paratroops flown in from France. By midnight Kesselring had assembled 20,000 men around Anzio, with many more on the way. Artillery positions had been established 3,000 feet up in the Alban Hills, dominating beaches and port. This was not going to be another walkover for us – indeed it became one of the most desperate and costly campaigns of World War II, and a near-disaster.
Hitler, braced for the fall of Rome and cataclysmic battles in Russia, knew that for the Allies a bridgehead defeat would be a frightening reminder that the Wehrmacht could still prove invincible. It would show the world that an Allied Second Front could be thrown back into the English Channel. It could force the delay or even the cancellation of D-Day.
He repeated in his Order of the Day that there must be no surrender: ‘Fight with bitter hatred an enemy who conducts a ruthless war of annihilation against the German people …’ He was evidently determined that the Wehrmacht should defend Rome with the fatal obstinacy displayed at Stalingrad. ‘The Führer expects the bitterest struggle for every yard.’ This would threaten the destruction of the Eternal City.
If Hitler was displeased with the battle so far, it was as nothing compared to the carefully suppressed anger of Churchill when the initial success of the combined operation he had encouraged was frittered-away by inexperienced or timid Generals. The isolated Anzio pocket of the US VI Corps was not racing to relieve the Fifth Army at Cassino, as planned, or driving triumphantly up Rome’s Via Veneto, but was itself trapped, besieged and liable to be pushed back into the sea.
It was an ill-planned operation which Churchill had rescued from the official graveyard of discarded military adventures. He had secretly believed the bridgehead might exorcise the ghosts of another disastrous landing: Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, 1915, which cost him his portfolio at the Admiralty. He afterwards admitted, ‘Anzio was my worst moment of the war – and I had most to do with it. I did not want two Suvla Bays in one lifetime.’
That evening we were still held up at the flyover, so I went back to Peter Beach to look for my sergeants. As I arrived, another hit-and-run fighter-bomber came in. Suddenly out at sea the air shuddered and against the darkening sky a sheet of orange flame spread across the horizon. A bomb had hit the destroyer Janus, which exploded and sank in 20 minutes with the loss of 150 men. The flame died quickly, leaving only an angry glare against the night sky.
As one of the attacking aircraft roared away over our heads, Bofors shells hit its tail. Every man on the beach was cheering as it crashed and exploded – but it was poor exchange for a destroyer and so many lives.
We did not know it at the time, but the drive for Rome, the Alban Hills and Cassino had not even been contemplated by our Commander, a grizzled and amiable American known as Corncob Charlie. A bespectacled artilleryman who enjoyed the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Major General John Lucas was 54 but seemed as old and benevolent as Father Christmas – though less active.
The Germans knew far more than we did about what was happening, because in a major stroke of luck one of their Allied prisoners was found to be carrying a copy of the entire Shingle Plan. This instantly confirmed Kesselring’s conviction that Lucas would not even attempt to cut his supply lines with Cassino.
He had ordered every unit to dig-in and consolidate – when they could have driven unopposed into the surrounding hills and cut Kesselring’s communications to the south. General Mark Clark cancelled the use of the US 504th Parachute Regiment along with the jump by an airborne division on to Rome Airport. The whole operation became stagnant, with commando raids discouraged and all effort concentrated upon defence. Fifty thousand troops were not enough for an attack, it seemed; we had to dig-in and await reinforcements. The Germans, meanwhile, had eighteen divisions south of Rome and were anxious to use them.
Lucas did not think of Rome, he thought of Gallipoli, Tobruk and Dunkirk, of desperate defeat. In the first 48 hours our initial Anzio victory was thrown-away. This is where we needed the fire-eating fast-moving General Patton.
During the planning for Shingle, General Lucas had confessed to his diary his nervousness about the Anzio operation, ‘This whole affair has a strong odour of Gallipoli, and apparently the same amateur (Churchill) is still on the coach’s bench.’ When he risked voicing that opinion to the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean, Admiral Sir John Cunningham, he got a sharp sailor’s reaction: ‘If that’s how you feel you’d better resign.’ He did not.
Even Lucas’s Commander, General Mark Clark, had warned him ‘not to stick his neck out’ the way he had (he said) at Salerno. He was telling Lucas to fight the battle as he saw fit, but it is incredible that such a cautious and unenterprising General should have been chosen to lead a daring operation demanding dash and drive. However, this advice may have been influenced by Clark’s determination to liberate Rome himself. He did not want some bemused subordinate arriving there first, after a lucky punch.
We had achieved surprise with our landing, so half the battle was won; but then the slow Allied exploitation and the intensity of the German reaction instantly recreated the equilibrium, and the attacking British and Americans fell back into the submissive posture of a besieged garrison.
The Germans were amazed we made no move; surely it was unthinkable that we should do nothing? With such cooperation they had little difficulty in containing us. Their reaction to our invasion became almost overwhelming: within days seven divisions had been rushed in to surround us, including Panzers with Tiger tanks.
British commanders were seething with frustration at their enforced inaction. Up in the front line I found Guardsmen brewing-up and their officers playing bridge, while awaiting orders. They should have been racing for Rome.
In Cairo, General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson (‘Jumbo’) who had just succeeded General Eisenhower as Allied Commander Mediterranean, made it clear to the Press – and to Kesselring – that he was going to defend, not attack. ‘If the Germans run true to style, as they always do’ he announced 48 hours after our landing, ‘they will counter-attack our beachhead.’ Thus he advertised our passive intentions to the enemy.
So all was not going well at Anzio. We had launched a major landing led by only two divisions, plus Commandos and US Rangers. At Salerno, with no surprise and no numerical dominance, we only just escaped being flung back into the sea, defeated. Clutching desperately at a landing beach an attacker initially needs total dominance, as General Montgomery well knew.
When Churchill first showed him the plan for Overlord, the Second Front in Normandy which he was to command when he left Italy, Montgomery’s immediate reaction was, ‘This will not do. I must have more in the initial punch.’ D-Day in Normandy was to be in four months’ time, and Churchill admitted, ‘After considerable argument a whole set of arrangements was made in consequence