Inferno - Max Hastings [334]
The Anglo-American corps that landed on the coast farther north at Anzio in January, in fulfilment of Churchill’s personal vision, was confined to a narrow perimeter which the Germans attacked fiercely and repeatedly. “So back we go to World War I,” wrote a young officer of a Scottish regiment holding the line there. “Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones …” The routines of trench life and incessant bombardment dulled men’s senses. “Efficiency in general and combat efficiency in particular suffer when individuals remain too long and too constantly under the gun,” wrote Lt. Col. Jack Toffey of the U.S. Army. Behind the front, existence under siege became bizarrely domesticated: “This beachhead is the craziest place I have ever seen,” a U.S. signals officer wrote to his brother in New Jersey. “The boys have their own private horses, chickens, livestock, bicycles and everything else that the civilians left.” Some men planted vegetable gardens.
In February, the Germans launched a massive counterattack on the perimeter. “I never saw so many people killed around me before in all my life,” said an Irish Guards corporal. An NCO, watching as swine snuffled around the bodies of the dead in no-man’s-land, mused bitterly, “Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?” The Germans found the experience of Anzio as tough as the Allies did. “Spirits are not particularly high since 4½ years of war start to get on your nerves,” wrote one of Kesselring’s soldiers with some understatement. Another man observed on 28 January that he had been unable to get his boots off for a week: “The air roars and whistles. Shells explode all around us.” The February assault cost the Germans 5,400 casualties, and their army log reported: “It has become very difficult to evacuate the wounded. All ambulances, even the armoured ones, have been lost, making it necessary to use assault guns and Tiger tanks.” Some Allied units broke, streaming in flight towards the rear—and so too did several German ones, in the face of annihilatory U.S. and British artillery fire. The Allies expended 158,000 rounds during the February battles, ten for each one fired by the Wehrmacht.
Meanwhile farther south, though the Allies were still pinned in the mountains, their foes found nothing to celebrate. The German corps commander at Cassino, Gen. Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, told an aide: “The rotten thing is to keep fighting and fighting and to know all along that we have lost this war … Optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.” Von Senger, a rare and indisputable “good German,” soldiered on like the fine professional he was. But his men endured hell under Allied bombing and shelling, which levelled the town below as well as the monastery on the mountain. Explosions flung men about like “scraps of paper.” A German lieutenant described the March air attacks: “We could no longer see each other. All we could do was to touch and feel the next man. The blackness of night enveloped us and on our tongues was the taste of burnt earth.” Yet as clouds of dust subsided and the Allied infantry and tanks began to advance, still the Germans fought back. Craters and rubble created by the bombing obstructed the attackers, not the defenders. “Unfortunately we are fighting the best soldiers in the world—what men!” Alexander wrote ruefully to Brooke on 22 March.
The breakthrough in Italy, when it came, was too late and too incomplete to promote triumphalism: on 12 May Alexander