CHAPTER SIX
DANGER AHEAD
Replacements arrive for the 45th Division at Anzio, February 1944. [National Archives]
WHILE SPARKS AND HIS MEN had shivered in foxholes above Venafro, Winston Churchill, ever the adventurer, had pushed a bold plan code-named Operation Shingle. It was designed to end the stalemate in Italy, where the Allies were stalled in the Liri Valley and at other key strongpoints along the Winter Line. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army would continue to push against the Winter Line but would also land forces at Anzio, some thirty miles north of Monte Cassino and ninety from Rome. The divisions at Anzio would then link up with Allied forces farther south, finally breaking the deadlock.
There was just one problem: lack of landing craft to ferry troops to the invasion beaches. Most of the craft in the Mediterranean had been dispatched to England in preparation for Overlord—the scheduled spring 1944 invasion of France. The maximum number of troops that could therefore be landed was just two infantry divisions. “Either it was a job for a full army,” commented one American naval officer, “or it was no job at all; to attempt it with only two divisions was to send a boy on a man’s errand.” The decision to go ahead, even after the near disaster at Salerno, was made nevertheless. Again, Mark Clark opted to gamble.
Early on January 22, 1944, the American VI Corps, commanded by Major General John P. Lucas, landed at Anzio and walked ashore with minimal loss of life. The Germans had been taken by total surprise. By midnight, more than thirty-six thousand men and three thousand vehicles were ashore, with the loss of just thirteen men killed and ninety-seven wounded. But then Lucas, commanding the two divisions at Anzio, failed to take advantage of the element of surprise and attack toward Rome.
It was imperative that the Allies at least seize the Alban Hills, some ten miles inland, to prevent the Germans from using the higher ground to pulverize the beachhead with artillery fire. Instead, Lucas ordered his generals to dig in and prepare for a counterattack. “Lucas did not think of Rome,” recalled British journalist Alan Whicker, who was with the Fifth Army, recording its advance with a special film unit. “He thought of Gallipoli, Tobruk and Dunkirk, of desperate defeat. In the first forty-eight hours our initial Anzio victory was thrown away.”
Why Mark Clark had chosen the timid Lucas remains a hotly debated question to this day. He was certainly no George Patton. During the planning phase, the grandfatherly, pipe-smoking Lucas had noted with ominous precision in his diary: “This whole affair has a strong odor of Gallipoli, and apparently the same amateur [Churchill] is still on the coach’s bench.”
THE TYRRHENIAN SEA off the coast of Anzio was unnervingly calm. The sun shone brightly that morning as Sparks approached the town’s harbor. What had happened to the Germans? There was no angry clatter of machine guns, no need to hunch down and flinch at every whistle of a shell. Men scanned the shoreline in disbelief and wondered if the war had in fact ended.
The regiment unloaded almost casually at the dockside in Anzio, once the home of the debauched Roman emperor Caligula and the birthplace of Nero. Men had to step over toppled telephone polls as they moved inland, past stony-faced British troops manning anti-aircraft guns. Ahead lay rolling farmland that stretched inland for fifteen miles toward the first visible high ground, the Alban Hills. A few miles to the north of Anzio, they set up camp near a forest of pine and cork, known as the Padiglione Woods. The nearby Pontine Marshes had been successfully drained by Mussolini but then, in what many considered an act of biological warfare, had been flooded by the Germans to impede the Allies. It didn’t take long for the Thunderbirds to realize the marshes were now the source of swarms of mosquitoes.
“Whatever we’re going into,” said one laconic Thunderbird, “it can’t be worse than fighting those damned mountains. The sun’s shining, there’s no mud, and no hills to climb. Buck up, we got nothin’ to worry about.”
As Sparks and his men settled down for the night in the Padiglione Woods, they had no idea that General Lucas had failed to seize the initiative and that seventy thousand Germans were headed their way. Sparks in fact believed that the landings had been a great success. He would soon be leading his men victoriously toward Rome.
On their radios in their bivouacs beneath the towering pines, the Thunderbirds heard the German propaganda broadcaster, Axis Sally, read out the names and serial numbers of men who had been taken prisoner. “Easy, boys, there’s danger ahead,” Sally then purred before playing a recording of “Lili Marlene,” a tune so popular that both Axis and Allied troops whistled it throughout Europe.
Two days later, on January 31, 1944, Sparks learned that some Allied troops, fifteen miles inland, at the very edge of the Anzio beachhead, were being hit hard by the Germans. He was then ordered to move his company up to the front and relieve a hard-pressed company of the 36th Engineer Regiment positioned on the left flank of the beachhead, soon to be dubbed the “Bitch-Head” by cynical GIs.
Fearing some of his men might go AWOL as the company moved up to the front lines, Sparks placed E Company’s first sergeant and executive officer in the rear.
“Don’t let anybody drop out,” Sparks told them.
Once a man was allowed to go missing from action, his willpower was smashed for good and he would be useless in combat.
The engineers’ positions were a grim spectacle indeed. Dead bodies lay strewn across the shell-holed battlefield nearby. It was equally unsettling to discover that the engineers had been pressed into frontline combat. There was clearly an acute lack of manpower. Sparks began to suspect that all was not well on the beachhead.
Because the Allies had failed to seize the Alban Hills, the Germans were able to look down on every inch of the beachhead. They soon started to pound the landing beaches and then the town of Anzio itself. As artillery zeroed in on key targets in every sector of the beachhead, Albert Kesselring’s troops massed for an all-out attack: more than ten divisions of armor and men, several of them crack combat units. Not since the Blitzkrieg of spring 1940, when the Germans had rolled to Paris in less than six weeks, had such a large attacking force gathered to do battle in the West. The key objective was the main road that led from Anzio to Rome, the Via Anziate. If German armor could advance south along it, then Kesselring would be able to push the Allies back into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Allied intelligence quickly identified the German buildup, and Lucas ordered the 45th Division and other units to shore up defenses to prevent a German breakthrough. On February 14, 1944, Sparks and his men in E Company were therefore ordered to take up new positions. Beneath a bright moon they dug in two miles north of a railroad bridge, dubbed the “Flyover” by GIs, which spanned the vital Via Anziate.
Sparks placed all three of the rifle platoons in his company in a line on either side of the Via Anziate. Two platoons from the regiment’s anti-tank company set up behind the riflemen in anticipation of a German strike with tanks. Two tank destroyers also moved in to support them. From briefings, Sparks knew that a mile to his east, beyond higher ground called the Buon Riposo Ridge, stood several abandoned factories. A mile to his rear, to the south, was a labyrinth of large man-made caves, big enough to drive trucks through, reaching far into a shale ridge. Here his regiment’s Second Battalion had set up its command post along with an aid station. It was also base for the 158th Artillery’s radio crew.
At around 1 A.M. the following day, February 15, Sparks heard the rumble of trucks and the screech and clank of tank treads. The Germans were on the move. A few miles to the north, across a no-man’s-land of shallow ditches and draws, thousands of young German soldiers checked their ammunition, wrote last letters, and then began to march to their jump-off positions. They were under orders from Hitler to “lance the abscess below Rome” by charging through the Allies’ defensive lines and pushing down the Via Anziate to the sea. Operation Fischfang, aimed at destroying the Allied beachhead, was about to begin.
As soon as he had learned of the Anzio landings, Hitler had ordered they be repelled at all costs. “Fight with bitter hatred an enemy who conducts a ruthless war of annihilation against the German people,” he now blustered. “The Führer expects the bitterest struggle for every yard.”