CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ROME
After fighting through Sicily and at Anzio, a GI visits the Colosseum in Rome on June 9, 1944, with two Italian women. [National Archives]
THERE WERE NOW BLUE-AND-WHITE signs for Roma, the Eternal City, at road junctions. The first Axis capital in Europe was tantalizingly close. On June 3, members of the First Special Service Force, an elite American-Canadian paratroop brigade, passed these and other road signs, some of which had been turned to point the wrong way, as they fought their way into the city’s ugly southern outskirts.
Leading these “Black Devils,” as the Germans respectfully called the men with red spearheads on their shoulder patches, was a truly remarkable leader of men in combat: thirty-seven-year-old Brigadier General Robert Frederick. “He wore a somewhat inconsequential mustache and this, combined with a gentle manner,” recalled Major General Lucien Truscott, “gave him more the look of a haberdashery clerk than the first-class fighting man he was.”
Frederick would receive eight Purple Hearts by war’s end. Lithe and fit as a predatory cat, recalled a fellow officer, he was reputed to have made his first combat jump in slippers after just ten minutes’ training. He was without question unnervingly calm under fire and ruthlessly aggressive. At Anzio, his men had crept behind enemy lines and left calling cards beside the corpses of Germans whose throats they slit: “DAS DICKE ENDE KOMMT NOCH!”—“THE WORST IS YET TO COME.”
Around midday on June 3, 1944, Frederick watched as his men began the final attack into Rome. A jeep approached. Major General Geoffrey Keyes, the fifty-six-year-old II Corps commander, got out of the jeep.
“General Frederick,” said Keyes. “What’s holding you up here?”
“The Germans, sir.”
“How long will it take you to get across the city limits?”
“The rest of the day. There are a couple of guns up there.”
“That will not do. General Clark must be across the city limits by four o’clock.”
Frederick questioned the sudden imposition of such an arbitrary deadline.
“He has to have a photograph taken.”
Frederick tried to hide his contempt.
“Tell the General to give me an hour.”
The Allies now enjoyed real momentum for the first time in mainland Italy. But rather than destroy the retreating German divisions of the Tenth Army, Mark Clark had actually disobeyed orders from his immediate superior, the British general Harold Alexander, commander of all Allied forces in Italy. Instead of delivering the knockout blow, he had diverted crucial forces toward Rome, which had little strategic value after it was declared an open city by Kesselring.
The decision to do so was as stupid as it was insubordinate. In opting for a Roman apotheosis over the destruction of the Tenth Army, Clark would end up prolonging the war in Italy for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Clark’s yearning to be the great liberator of Rome would undermine everything his troops, including Felix Sparks and his fellow Thunderbirds, had fought with such immense sacrifice and suffering to achieve.
It was Montgomery, shortly after the debacle at Salerno, who had advised Clark on how to deal with orders from Alexander: listen, nod agreement, and then do as one saw fit. In any case, Clark believed the honor of liberating the city was his by rights. “We Americans had slogged all the way from Salerno,” he recalled, “and I was not going to have this great prize denied me.”
At 4 P.M. that day, Clark duly arrived at Frederick’s command post accompanied by four staff officers and a large group of press. They found Frederick observing a fierce fight at a roadblock in the distance.
“What’s holding up the First Special Force?” asked Clark.
Frederick pulled out a map and indicated German positions.
“I’m holding off the artillery because of civilians.”
“I wouldn’t hesitate to use it if you need it,” replied Clark. “We can’t be held up here too long.”
Flashbulbs popped as Clark turned toward a nearby road sign that spelled ROMA and asked Frederick to have his picture taken with him standing by it.
“Golly, Bob,” Clark said as they were photographed. “I would like that sign as a souvenir. Will you get it for me?”
A grim-looking Frederick asked one of his men, a half-track driver, to get onto a fence and knock the sign down for Clark. Suddenly there was the crack of a shot from a German sniper. Everyone dived into the nearest ditch.
“That’s what’s holding up the First Special Service Force!” blurted Frederick.
Clark and his entourage withdrew.
Around 6 P.M. that evening, Frederick joined the forward elements of his force as they crossed over the Tiber on the marble-faced San Angelo Bridge, completed in A.D. 134 by the Roman emperor Hadrian. It was starting to get dark when a group of Germans, retreating from the south, suddenly appeared.
“Halt!” shouted Frederick.
The Germans opened fire. Frederick pulled out his .45 and emptied the clip while one of his men cut loose with a tommy gun. Frederick fell to the ground, hit in the right thigh and right arm, and then crawled back across the bridge toward cover, leaving a trail of blood a foot wide behind him. Several minutes later, a GI found him lying on the ground in a pool of blood.
“I’m okay,” said Frederick. “I’m okay.”
The Germans had meanwhile pulled out. Frederick spotted the half-track he had arrived in. Its driver had been killed. Minutes later, he was being treated at an aid station. A medic pleaded with him to go to a hospital.
“I don’t have time,” said Frederick.
Despite being in terrible pain and feeling tremendous guilt at the loss of his driver, he continued to issue orders as the battle to secure entry into Rome raged that evening. By 11 P.M., he learned that his men had seized all eight of the bridges across the Tiber that they had been assigned. With the help of his men, he left the aid station and made his way to the headquarters of Major General Alfred Gruenther, the Fifth Army’s chief of staff. En route, he noticed a blue-and-white sign, ROMA, similar to the one Clark had earlier requested. He pulled it down and tucked it under his arm. Shortly after, he limped into Gruenther’s tented HQ, where he found Charles Saltzman, the Fifth’s deputy chief of staff.
Frederick handed him the sign.
“It occurred to me that General Clark might want to add this to his souvenir collection.”
Saltzman did not respond to Frederick’s thinly veiled sarcasm. “Frederick was continuing on his nerves and whatever painkiller was in him,” he recalled. “He said he hadn’t slept for sixty hours.” Saltzman accompanied Frederick to see the no-nonsense Gruenther, notorious for grilling his generals during debriefings. Frederick impressed Saltzman by answering all of Gruenther’s questions accurately. A few hours later, on June 4, he was seated with aides in a hastily commandeered building in central Rome, still refusing to sleep as he examined maps and issued orders.
Reporter and cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who admired Frederick as much as he disdained Clark, found the Black Devils’ commander on the morning of June 4 lying in a bed, heavily bandaged. Frederick was angry that his men had been recklessly rushed toward Rome to secure Clark’s undying fame, causing avoidable casualties.
THERE WAS PRECIOUS little glory for the Thunderbirds as Rome fell, no celebrating with a raffia-wrapped flagon of cheap Chianti in St. Peter’s Square. Sparks could see the Eternal City in the distance, but he had been ordered to move his battalion a few miles to the west. The journey to there was a joyous one, however, even if he didn’t get to celebrate in the ancient capital. Ecstatic locals showered him with flowers as he passed through villages toward the regiment’s assigned bivouac area.
Later that morning, Clark convened a press conference in the magnificent Palazzo Senatorio overlooking the Piazza del Campidoglio. Thirty-two-year-old CBS news correspondent Eric Sevareid found the general lounging against a balcony, surrounded by correspondents.
“Well, gentlemen, I didn’t really expect to have a press conference here,” said Clark. “I just called a little meeting.”
Newsreel cameras rolled. Flashbulbs popped.
“This is a great day for the Fifth Army,” added Clark.
Sevareid was disgusted. “This was the immortal remark of Rome’s modern-day conqueror,” he later wrote. “It was not, apparently, a great day for the world, for the Allies, for all the suffering people who had desperately looked toward the time of peace.” There was no mention of Montgomery’s Eighth Army that had fought the Axis since November 17, 1941, in North Africa, accompanied the U.S. Fifth Army across Sicily, and then slogged up the jagged, fatal spine of Italy. No mention of the seven Allied nations whose sons had died in the still smoldering ruins of Monte Cassino. They had suddenly disappeared from history. As Sevareid pushed his way out of the press huddle, he overheard a colleague mutter: “On this historic occasion I feel like vomiting.”
ROME’S LIBERATION WAS celebrated around the world. Europe’s first Axis capital had fallen. “You have made the American people very happy,” Roosevelt cabled Clark. It was a great victory, agreed Stalin. Paris and then Berlin now beckoned.
Chasing the barbarians from the most famous of Italian cities had taken almost a year and cost twenty thousand American lives, with more than one hundred thousand injured. Had it been worth it? Many American strategists were unconvinced. The Italian campaign, they believed, had brought the war no nearer to an end. Churchill himself admitted that these skeptics, which included U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall, believed he had led them “up the garden path in the Mediterranean.” It would have been better to have left Italy well alone and concentrated efforts instead on opening a second front in Normandy. “But what a beautiful path it has proved to be,” Churchill added. “They [the Americans] have picked peaches here and nectarines there. How grateful they should be.” Understandably, such remarks enraged those who had long since begun to chafe at their British cousins’ thinly veiled snobbery and arrogance. “I never at any time considered Italy to be a garden path, and many of the Italian peaches had gonorrhea,” recalled Sparks. “As for the nectarines, I never saw any.”
MARK CLARK ENJOYED worldwide fame for less than forty-eight hours. At 6:30 A.M. on June 6, on “Omaha” and four other beaches in Normandy, Allied forces began to land on what would be remembered by most as the one and only D-Day. Thankfully, Allied planners had learned something from the fiascos of Salerno and Anzio and had decided to land as many divisions as possible over a broad front and then press rapidly inland.
“How do you like that?” said Clark after being woken with the news. “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”
The big story was now in France, not the rocky hell of Italy, where the Germans would yet again reassemble, this time north of Rome, and then fight on bitterly to the very end of the war against Mark Clark and his beleaguered Fifth Army. The advance would slow once more to just a few miles a day. According to the journalist Alan Whicker, who had plenty of opportunity to see Clark in action for the rest of his reign in Italy, “He remained the Germans’ favorite enemy General: he always gave them an easier time than they expected—and with his strong personality, always got away with it.”
As the Allies stormed ashore in Normandy, on the outskirts of Rome the Thunderbirds were finally, after months of mud and horror, laying down their M1s and tommy guns, sitting in the open aboveground without “brain furnaces”—helmets—and basking in the sunshine. In a typically understated letter to his parents, Sparks wrote: “We have been going at a back-breaking clip for the last three weeks. It was really an event for us to finally break through on the Anzio Beachhead although it was no easy job. We are all completely worn out.”
That afternoon, the Thunderbirds were able to relax for the first time in four months. Artillery radios were tuned to the BBC. Spirits soared when a news bulletin announced that Allied forces had landed successfully in France and were pushing inland. “Hope returned to the weary infantry,” recalled Jack Hallowell. “Morale went sky high. With that beachhead in France, the whole war was almost over. It had to be.” That night, for the first time in Italy, men didn’t even bother to dig in. Any day now, they would surely be headed home.
EVERY THUNDERBIRD HAD the chance to visit Rome. Armed with forty-eight-hour passes and cartons of brand-name cigarettes for barter, they gaped at the Colosseum, whistled at surprisingly stylish Roman girls in silk stockings, and devoured thick and juicy horse steaks at the San Carlo restaurant, a favorite with GIs. Many went to St. Peter’s and were blessed by Pope Pius XII. He held daily audiences at 11 A.M., giving benediction to thousands of Allied troops in three languages before graciously holding out his hand so true believers could kneel and kiss his ring finger before visiting the Circus Maximus and the Pantheon, their faith in a benign God temporarily restored.
On June 19, the Thunderbirds boarded trucks and the regiment headed south, back the way it had come, passing an endless caravan of olive-green vehicles. Men stared in silence as the trucks rolled through the ruins of Cisterna and along dusty roads where vengeful Spitfires had obliterated fleeing German convoys. Burned-out Panzers and armored vehicles had been shoved clumsily into ditches; charred corpses swarming with flies marked Kesselring’s route of hasty retreat. Finally, they arrived back where they had come ashore, at Paestum, near Salerno. Rumor had it the division was returning to the States. The Thunderbirds had done their part. But then they discovered they were to stay in the area and train for what would be their fourth major invasion, this time of southern France.
Operation Dragoon would land three American divisions, reinforced by the French 1st Armored Division, along the spectacularly scenic Côte d’Azur. At several briefings, Sparks examined extraordinarily detailed photos, taken by OSS agents, of the landing beaches. Planners had attempted to avoid a repeat of Salerno, opting to land where there was no high ground immediately beyond the shoreline. Nevertheless, it was estimated that there would be 20 percent casualties for the entire Seventh Army.
While they waited with dread for yet another D-day, men did their best to enjoy their first extended break from combat in a year. The temptations of Rome and Naples were ever present, the weather glorious, and the USO shows first-class. And there were young American women, serving doughnuts from Red Cross vans, to flirt with at last. “Everyone fell in love simultaneously with the girls and the doughnuts,” recalled Jack Hallowell.
As was usual during rest periods, generals visited to make rousing speeches and pin medals on chests. None other than Mark Clark, now referred to as “Marked Time” by some Thunderbirds, arrived to present Distinguished Unit Badges to the Second Battalion for its actions during the Battle of the Caves. Sparks himself was presented with the Silver Star, which he would soon send home to his parents for safekeeping. “I’m not crazy about earning any more!” he told them in a short V-mail.
Another Thunderbird, Technical Sergeant Jim Rutledge of L Company, received a Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest award for valor.
“Rutledge,” said Clark, “I’ve heard a good deal about you.”
“Yes sir,” replied a cocky Rutledge. “And I’ve heard a good deal about you, too.”
Clark then made an impassioned speech, vowing that the regiment would stay in Europe to the very end, until the fall of the Third Reich, and share in the glory of defeating Nazism. The speech was not greeted with loud applause. “The 157th had seen too much to be so easily inspired,” recalled one bystander. “Given their choices, they would gladly have sat out the march into Germany.”
The training grew more intense as the summer went on, as did the urge among the latest batch of replacements to “throw out the first pitch” and lose their virginity. “Have your fun,” young Italian men told their sisters. “But when the Americans go we will have nothing to do with you.” Few of Salerno’s signorinas paid much attention. They swam with Thunderbirds in the blue waters of the Bay of Salerno, visited Virgil’s tomb, and held hands with their American boyfriends in the cheap seats at the opera.
On terraces along the waterfront, GIs sat with Italian families, sharing tossed salads and zuppa di pesce as they watched the sun set over hundreds of ships gathering in the bay. Some had spent almost a year in Italy and a few had fallen in love with a country they now knew more intimately than many natives. “They had been more steadily in her rain, her snow and her mountains,” recalled Thunderbird Paul Cundiff, “and slept longer on and nearer her earth than most Italians.” Italy had indeed left its mark. “I have been in Italy so long I feel like a Dago, and probably look like one too,” one man wrote. “We speak about half Dago and about half English now, with a lot of Army slang thrown in.”
Then came news that the regiment was once again to be called to the boats gathering in the bay, just as Jupiter had summoned the warriors of Virgil’s epic Aeneid to their destiny. A nearby beach resembled a battlefield of sex as men lined up one last time to “jog their haunches” with a prostitute while others thoughtfully held up sheets to provide a modicum of privacy. They had paid not a bit of notice to the exhortations of the council president of the Mormon Church back in America: “We should say to our boys: come home in purity, or come home not at all.” Few would return home unharmed. None would be pure.
In early August, the regiment moved to the deepwater port of Naples. The day before the Thunderbirds were scheduled to load onto boats bound for France, Second Battalion commander Colonel Krieger fell sick with malaria. Sparks was ordered to take his place. Aged just twenty-six, he was now in charge of three rifle companies, E, F, and G, numbering around six hundred men in total, as well as a heavy-weapons company with considerable firepower: eight .30-caliber water-cooled machine guns; six 81mm mortars that could fire fifteen pounds of high explosive over two miles; and several antitank guns. Including his headquarters staff, he would be responsible for the lives of almost a thousand young Americans as the Allies stormed the golden sands of southern France.