The Steel Wave - Jeff Shaara [24]
The plan called for the American Sixth Corps, under Major General John Lucas, to land on the beach at Anzio, only thirty-five miles south of Rome, well behind the German defensive line. Establishing their beachhead, the Americans would quickly drive inland, severing the link between the German positions and Rome itself. If the plan worked, Kesselring’s forces would be pressed from two sides and possibly surrounded. At the very least, American troops might sweep northward into Rome, which would be an enormous boost of morale for the Allies and the beleaguered Italians, who still feared that the Germans might destroy their ancient city. If the Germans somehow escaped the pincer, Kesselring would have no choice but to pull his forces northward, farther up the Italian peninsula and away from the mountainous defenses that had given the Allies such difficulty. Faced with such a crisis, it was unlikely that any German troops could be stripped away from Kesselring and sent to reinforce the defense of the beaches in France. A successful landing at Anzio could very well shorten the war.
On January 22, Lucas’s thirty-six thousand men and a massive supply of trucks and armor landed with virtually no opposition; the Germans seemed caught completely by surprise. But then the plan broke down. Though the beachhead was secured, Lucas delayed his push inland, choosing instead to reinforce his already formidable strength, resupplying and consolidating his position along the coast. The delay gave Kesselring’s Germans all the time they needed to mount a brutal counterattack, and now the Americans were pinned against the Anzio beachhead in what had become a desperate fight for survival. Within two weeks of the landings, Allied optimism for a quick burst into Rome had dissolved, and Anzio was now a raw nerve for the prime minister. Eisenhower understood that the operation now bogging down so badly was too reminiscent of the British disaster at Gallipoli, the amphibious operation in the First World War that had nearly cost Churchill his career. Whether or not Churchill was overreacting to the American failure, Eisenhower knew, as did Marshall, that if the Germans crushed the Allied effort in Italy, it would seriously dampen the tentative enthusiasm the British were showing for Operation Overlord. Instead of shortening the war, it could lengthen it considerably. Thus far, the only thing shortened was General Lucas’s career.
Eisenhower scanned the long table. Sir Alan Brooke, the British chief of staff, was staring sourly into his cup of tea.
“There is responsibility here,” Brooke said. “Jumbo Wilson knows this. Despite our best efforts, we have underestimated the enemy’s will to resist. It was perhaps premature to remove some of our best people from the Mediterranean before conditions there were more secure.”
It was a familiar refrain, the British seeming always to dwell solely on the difficulties of any operation, an annoying tendency Eisenhower had to deal with carefully. He knew the reasons, an ingrained dread that had come from the disasters at Dunkirk and Tobruk. There were successes, of course, but the British could not escape their memories of the Great War, the awful carnage born of stalemate, the years of unending death that had cost England, and Europe, a generation of young men. It had infected the British throughout the planning for Overlord, fears that even a successful invasion of Normandy would result in that same kind