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in underground cellars in the via Romana in Nettuno, close to where he had got off the boat. He then kept them there, far from the British sectors, and at one point a practice evacuation was even carried out. ‘Slow in movement and speech,’ records Anzio’s historian, ‘Shingle’s pilot was as far removed from a dynamic, charismatic leader as could be imagined.’42 The British war correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas wrote that Lucas had ‘the round face and the greying moustache of a kindly country solicitor’. Lack of progress meant that Lucas was replaced on 23 February by the altogether more dashing Major-General Lucian Truscott, who wore a silk scarf around his neck that was part of an airman’s escape kit. Both Alexander and Clark, who rubber-stamped all Lucas’ decisions but escaped censure, were affected by what today is called legacy-thinking. They refought the battle of Salerno at Anzio, without taking into account the key differences between the two operations, the main one being that the latter had the inestimable advantage of total surprise. Alexander, who had to be a mediator as much as a commander with his multi-national force, ought to have set out far more specific objectives than he did, allowing both Clark and Lucas less leeway. They were nonetheless right not to have made a dash for the Alban Hills just south-east of Rome on landing, as some now argue they ought to have. With his forces strung out from Anzio to the mountains it would have been simple for the counter-attacking Germans to cut Lucas off, and the heights would have turned into the largest POW camp in Italy. Equally, had he pushed on northwards to Rome, he would have had, in his own picturesque phrase, ‘one night in Rome and eighteen months in PoW camps’. Dick Evans, the adjutant of the 1st Battalion King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, agreed wholeheartedly with this assessment: ‘In the first two days we could have driven straight into Rome. Then we would have been slaughtered.’

The harbours of Anzio and Nettuno, and the armada needed to keep the beach-head resupplied, took a severe battering from the Germans once Kesselring put the aerial side of Case Richard into operation. In the ten days after the landings he summoned a force of 140 long-range bombers from outside Italy, and sixty more from southern French bases. The ships supplying the Anzio beach-head had to face E-boat torpedoes, bombs and the terrifying new invention of radio-operated, rocket-powered glider bombs, although all the human torpedo attacks failed miserably. The cruiser Spartan, destroyers Janus, Jervis and Plunkett and minesweeper Prevail, as well as a hospital ship and troop transporter, were all lost. Nonetheless, over 68,000 men, 237 tanks and 508 guns came ashore in the first week, a great inter-Allied and inter-service achievement. In all, no less than half a million tons of supplies were landed at Anzio, which for a brief moment became the world’s fourth busiest port. Those who landed in that first week faced 71,500 Germans, including 7,000 crack troops from the 26th Panzer Division defending Cisterna.

The British attack on the key railway station at Campoleone failed. Major-General W. R. C. Penney’s 1st Infantry Division began its assault on 28 January, badly delayed because of an ambush of some key Grenadier Guards officers. Only one man, from the 2nd Battalion, the Sherwood Foresters, got across the railway line, but he was subsequently killed, along with 244 other comrades from his regiment in the space of only ten minutes. Campoleone was not to fall for over three months. In all, 23,860 American and 9,203 British Commonwealth casualties had to be taken off the beaches in the Anzio operation, apart from around 7,000 who had been killed there. The life expectancy of a forward observation officer was a mere six weeks.43 Those who fought at Anzio saw the full horrors of the Second World War close up. An army surgeon called James A. Ross, who later became president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, recalled the scene in a casualty clearing station inside the