The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [227]
The wounded lay in two rows, mostly British but some American as well in their sodden filthy clothes… soaked, caked, buried in mud and blood; with ghastly pale faces, shuddering, shivering with the cold of the February night and their great wounds… some (too many; far too many) were carried in dying, with gross combinations of shattered limbs, protrusions of intestines and brain from great holes in their poor frames torn by 88-millimetre shells, mortar and anti-personnel bombs.44
By 7 February 1944 it was clear that the British War Cabinet had severe reservations about the way the Italian campaign – especially at Anzio – was progressing. ‘The battle in Italy is approaching its climax,’ Churchill reported, according to the notes of the War Cabinet Secretariat:
Two weeks ago we had high hopes of a military success – now we still have hopes of an uphill slogging match, which may nevertheless succeed… The 5th Army not yet delivered its attack – force not yet engaged and may at any moment advance on enemy’s front – Enemy troops stretched, no relief. No reason to suppose possibility of decisive victory has faded away. But the strategic principles on which the operations were founded are sound and persist in bringing their rewards in spite of tactical disappointments. The German attempt to crush the bridgehead failed… Advisers not alarmed… We have a front engaging 19 divisions of the enemy. Hitler evidently on impulse had 6 or 7 divisions sent down. Our duty is to fight and engage all our forces with the enemy. Hitler does not want all his forces engaged on the peninsula. Our battle must be nourished. Disappointing not to gain tactical success.45
Churchill then said something that Lawrence Burgis took down as ‘US asked us for an appreciation… In US may say Eisenhower removed.’ This is capable of the interpretation that Eisenhower’s job would on the line in the United States if victory was not won in Italy, and when the Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin said that he should send Alexander a message of encouragement, Churchill said, ‘I’ll think about it,’ which was hardly a ringing endorsement.
The great German counter-attack, Operation Fischfang (Catch Fish), came on 16 February, with Mackensen’s intention to drive down the via Anziate to Anzio and throw the Allies back into the sea. Supported by a 452-gun bombardment, Mackensen flung his 125,000 troops against the Allies’ 100,000, but Allied artillery and naval guns fired no fewer than 65,000 rounds on the first day alone. Fierce engagements developed at the road’s flyover at Campo di Carne on 18 February, with craters formed, mines laid and concrete-laden lorries blocking the underpass below. ‘Cooks, drivers and clerks fought side by side with infantry,’ records the battle’s historian as the Germans reached what was ominously designated ‘the Final Beach-head Line’.46 Close co-operation between the Allied artillery and infantry – it is estimated that they fired around fifteen times more shells during the battle than the Wehrmacht – made all the difference in a struggle where the air forces could not operate because of the low visibility. Light reconnaissance aircraft were used, however, to devastating effect. In all at Anzio, 10 per cent of German losses were due to Allied infantry, 15 per cent to aerial bombardment, but no less than 75 per cent to the artillery – figures which, as the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst historian Lloyd Clark has pointed out, are virtually identical to the statistics for the Western Front in the Great War.47
Mackensen’s offensive, broken up by artillery bombardment and tenacious resistance on the ground, failed to reach further than 7 miles from Anzio, and petered out by the evening of 19 February. It had cost the Fourteenth Army 5,400 casualties, against VI Corps’ 3,500. From then on there were nearly three months of almost continuous fighting in what were known by the British Army as the wadis, the sunken marshlands and mosquito-ridden tributaries of the upper Moletta river. Although the front lines were broadly static in the