CHAPTER TWELVE
THE BREAKOUT
A Fifth Army GI comforts a badly wounded comrade on the first day of the Allied breakout from Anzio, Mary 23, 1943. [National Archives]
SPRING FINALLY ARRIVED. Nightingales sang above the Via Anziate, where so many Thunderbirds had died. Poppies and other bright flowers dotted the ravaged earth, swaying lazily in the warm breezes, obscuring the scatterings of bullets and rotting corpses. As men pulled back heavy canvas covers and basked in the sunshine in their foxholes, they talked of rumors about a big buildup, this time to punch out of the ring of iron around Anzio.
Patrols became more frequent. Fake artillery pieces made of rubber and wood were spread across some rear areas to distract the German bombers as thousands of real guns were shuttled up to the front line at night. Each day, hundreds of replacements marched from the shattered docks in Anzio to jump-off positions. All through early May, long lines of trucks stretched from the port, carrying men and weapons to the front, lugging new 240mm howitzers, the largest artillery pieces ever used by the U.S. Army, capable of throwing 360 pounds of high explosive over fourteen miles.
On May 21, 1944, Sparks learned that the rumors were true. A massive attack aimed at breaking out of the beachhead, code-named Operation Buffalo, would begin in just forty-eight hours. Newly promoted to major, he was placed second in command of the regiment’s Second Battalion, which comprised three companies, and was summoned to the regimental command post to discuss the plan in detail. As Sparks approached the post, he saw several officers standing near the entrance. A lone artillery shell landed close by. Nobody was hurt, but one of the officers, a chaplain, broke down and started screaming. He had been at Anzio for only two weeks. Sparks wondered if he had suddenly lost his faith—his conviction that God would protect him.
The plan of attack, Sparks learned, was simple enough. The six German divisions trapping the Allies on the Anzio beachhead would be bombed and shelled as never before by more guns and planes than had ever been assembled on a European battlefield. Sparks’s regiment alone would be supported by ninety-six artillery pieces—four times the usual number. Two extra divisions had been brought in to bolster the Allied forces, bringing the total to 160,000 men, 20,000 more than the Germans. It would be a close-run thing with high casualties guaranteed. There was no easy way to break out of the “Bitch-Head.”
To confuse the enemy in the build-up to the attack, men like Bill Lyford, who manned a Browning automatic rifle, were ordered to open fire at different times in what soon became known as “turkey shoots.” Lyford at first enjoyed adding tracer rounds to his magazine and watching them gently arc through the sky like long chains of Christmas lights. But suddenly it was as if the whole front pivoted around and every German in Italy was firing back at him. He rolled back into his hole and took out the tracers. Turkey shooting was far more fun from the bottom of a foxhole.
For two days, Sparks and the regiment girded themselves for what Prime Minister Churchill described as “an all-out conquer or die.” Thoughts turned once more to life and death. Thunderbirds carefully cut out the red circles at the centers of Lucky Strike cigarette packs and used them as filters for their flashlights, hunkering down to write last letters home, a dim pink flicker illuminating the fading pinups of Hollywood starlets in their humid holes. When they took a shower in an abandoned German blockhouse, they asked themselves if they would ever get clean again. Some hoped they would be hit by shrapnel and be taken off the line. Losing a limb might be better than having to sprint across minefields, carpeted in spring violets and buttercups, while dodging mortar rounds.
Sparks worried too. Most of the men in the Second Battalion were now replacements—many of them just out of high school—who would have to advance into the sights of machine guns for the first time. Just like their forefathers in the Great War in Flanders, they would have to fix bayonets, leave their dugouts, and go “over the top.”
Would inexperienced squad and platoon leaders follow his company commanders’ orders when the Germans inevitably counterattacked with tanks?
LONG BEFORE DAWN, Thunderbirds boiled instant coffee and smoked Lucky Strike after Lucky Strike. Some spoke in staccato whispers, scared to break the eerie silence. Few felt like eating their K ration breakfasts. Riflemen checked newly oiled M1s, platoon leaders snapped magazines into their tommy guns, BAR gunners like Bill Lyford strapped on leather harnesses holding ammunition and waited for the call of a lieutenant to move out. Dawn cracked on the horizon. Squads filed into gullies, their faces etched with fear, and crept toward no-man’s-land. For late May, the weather was unusually brisk and cool.
At a forward observation post, the Fifth Army’s Mark Clark joined General Lucian Truscott, who had replaced Lucas as commander of the Anzio forces, to wait for over five hundred artillery pieces to open up on the German positions.
It was 5:40 A.M.
“In about five minutes those Krauts will catch the damndest barrage they ever saw,” said an artillery observer. “And after that I wouldn’t give two hoots in hell for anybody’s chances.”
At 5:45 A.M., the horizon filled with flashes and explosions as the Allies launched the greatest barrage of the war to date. Countless thousands of rounds hurtled overhead, and within seconds a dense pall of smoke was spreading across the beachhead. A timid sun peaked over the limestone Lepini Mountains to the west as General Truscott stared into the distance in awe. “A wall of fire appeared as our salvos crashed into the enemy front lines,” he recalled, “then tracers wove eerie patterns in streaks of light as hundreds of machine guns of every caliber poured a hail of steel into enemy positions.” The din was so great that men had to shout into each other’s ears to be heard. It seemed Mark Clark had mustered every howitzer in the Mediterranean in his attempt to blow his way out of Anzio. Not a single Thunderbird complained of profligacy as the ground trembled beneath his feet. To Sparks, it sounded like the “world was coming to an end.”
When the shelling ended, teenagers in Sparks’s Second Battalion gritted their teeth and fixed sharpened bayonets to their M1s. Platoon leaders snapped orders. Men climbed out of their foxholes and moved toward barbed wire and enemy trenches. They were soon passing through wheat fields at a running crouch, crawling through deep draws, creeping through a cemetery with its broken and shattered headstones, and sprinting for cover as they closed on the ruins of farmhouses where snipers and artillery observers from the Third Panzergrenadier Division lurked among the piles of bloodstained bricks and cracked terracotta tiles. Men tossed grenades down cellar gratings and sprayed .45 bullets at every window and door.
Open ground lay beyond, leading to the Second Battalion’s first objective, a high-banked railroad track close to the Via Anziate. Then came the crunch and crump of mines exploding, followed by screams of men whose legs and feet had been blown off. The Germans had buried mines everywhere, seeding no-man’s-land with “Bouncing Betties” that castrated with three hundred and sixty flying ball bearings, “nutcrackers” that fired a single round into the groin, and Shu mines, each containing a quarter pound of TNT, which were buried an inch or two under the sandy ground.
Sparks ordered tank destroyers to clear paths through the mines. His men advanced once more and had reached the railroad by sundown. Elsewhere, Allied units had pushed several miles from their jumping-off points. On the Thunderbirds’ right flank, the Third Division had punched its way to the reeking ruins of a village called Cisterna but had paid heavily for a charge across no-man’s-land with fixed bayonets, losing almost a thousand men, the greatest one-day loss for an American infantry division in World War II.
The following day, Sparks’s Second Battalion attacked once more. The silvery specks of fighters dueled far above. Vapor trails left by Flying Fortress bombers latticed the southern sky. American Piper Cubs, so small and flimsy in comparison, circled like hawks trying to spot the enemy’s movements. Early that afternoon of May 24, one reported that twenty-four Mark VI tanks were rolling toward the battalion. Around 3 P.M., they smashed into the Thunderbirds’ lines. “I thought we were going to have a rout on our hands,” Sparks recalled. “We had a hard time restoring order there for a while. I was yelling at everybody that they couldn’t go back.” Thanks to several tank destroyers, which had highly effective 90mm guns that fired rounds with a flat trajectory, the German tanks were halted. But it was only when the 158th Artillery also zeroed in on the Mark V and VI giants that the armored counterattack was beaten off.
So it went all along the Anzio front. Kesselring threw everything he had at the advancing Allies, but he no longer had either enough men or artillery shells to stop them. Sparks’s battalion stabbed northwest across the Campo di Carne, aiming for the town of Velletri in the Alban Hills, from which the Germans had fired countless shells for more than four months. Regimental commander Colonel John Church pushed Sparks and his other field officers relentlessly toward the vital high ground. Medic Robert “Doc” Franklin was in Church’s command post when he learned that I Company commander, Captain J. G. Evans, had dared to question Church’s orders to take yet another well-defended German position.
“Take that hill!” snapped Church.
“Colonel, if I take that hill I’ll be cut off and captured. I have no flank protection.”
“I don’t give a damn! Take that hill!”
I Company took the hill, but Evans and others were indeed captured.
In another memorable action, lanky technical sergeant Van T. Barfoot, from Edingburg, Mississippi, earned himself one of just eight Congressional Medals of Honor given to Thunderbirds in World War II. When his platoon was pinned down, he crawled on his belly through a field of wheat until he was around twenty yards from a German machine-gun position. He reached for a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it at the Germans. The gun was silenced. There was a slit trench nearby. A rampaging Barfoot jumped into it and opened up with his ten-pound Thompson machine gun, hitting several figures in gray uniforms with .45 rounds. Later that afternoon, after he had reassembled his platoon, he managed to stop a tank with a bazooka, shoot its crew, and disable a German artillery piece. Before the day was over, he had also carried two wounded soldiers to safety.
Other men were as courageous but not as fortunate. By nightfall, there were more than five hundred casualties from the 45th Division—so many that Thunderbirds were forced to share cots with each other in aid stations.
IT WAS AROUND 7:30 A.M. when Captain Ben Souza, leading a platoon of combat engineers, stepped onto a damaged bridge. He looked up to see a jeep speeding toward him. The jeep’s driver, Lieutenant Francis Buckley, pulled over and saluted Souza.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” asked Souza.
“I’m trying to make contact with the Anzio forces,” said Buckley.
Souza smiled. “Boy, you’ve made it.”
Buckley belonged to the Fifth Army forces that had finally taken Monte Cassino, broken through the Winter Line with the help of fifteen hundred artillery guns, and then pushed north toward Anzio. There were no longer two fronts in Italy. The long-awaited linkup was finally a reality.
The news relayed from the field kept getting better in Mark Clark’s command post. On May 27, several German divisions began to retreat. Thousands of grim-faced but relieved Germans filed along the shell-holed Via Anziate, hands above heads, bound for enormous POW cages in Nettuno. The breakout gathered momentum as Kesselring opted to pull back his remaining forces in the hope of establishing yet another defensive position, aptly named the Hitler Line, north of Rome.
It had taken four days of costly bludgeoning. More than four thousand men had been lost, one every minute. Among the fatalities was Sergeant Leon Siehr, the only man from E Company other than Sparks who had returned from the Battle of the Caves that February. But after 127 days of stalemate, the Allies had finally broken free from Anzio.
GRATEFUL LOCALS WELCOMED Sparks and his Second Battalion and plied them with wine as they entered the hill town of Velletri. Unlike Cisterna and every other town on the beachhead below, Velletri had suffered little damage. The Thunderbirds had at long last left the “Bitch-Head” behind. “It was like being freed from the greatest of Nazi concentration camps,” recalled an elated Jack Hallowell, who arrived with the regimental headquarters staff. “Men looked down on the old beachhead from the heights they now occupied and wondered how they had survived.”
The views were spectacular. The Germans had been able to see everything, every movement, aboveground. Below lay the Campo di Carne, a vast field of broken machines, shell-holes, blackened rubble, and death. The splintered pines and cork trees of the Padiglione Woods, where Sparks had slept the first night he had come ashore, were clearly visible. So was the bare Buonriposo Ridge, near the caves, where he had somehow lived when so many of his men had died.