The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [229]
Admittedly, breaking out of the Anzio perimeter was still no easy task. By the end of 23 May, 3rd US Infantry Division of VI Corps had lost 955 men, the largest number of any US division on any single day during the whole war.54 German losses were equally heavy, however. By the evening of Wednesday, 24 May, Truscott’s VI Corps was making good progress towards Valmontone, and the prospect beckoned of the Tenth Army being trapped in the valley on Route 6, with many forced to surrender. Contact was finally made between the two Allied forces at 07.30 on Thursday, 25 May, more than four months after the Anzio landings, and Cisterna also fell later that day.
Yet, instead of obeying his orders from Alexander, on Friday, 26 May Clark deliberately reduced the force Truscott needed to capture Valmontone – the true Schwerpunkt – with the result that the Germans were able to keep their retreat route open all the time between 26 May and 4 June, and so the Tenth Army escaped. Clark kept the greater part of his force to make a dash for Rome – which Kesselring had anyhow evacuated – taking it largely unopposed on 5 June, the day before D-Day and therefore just early enough for him to bask in global approbation for a full twenty-four hours before attention turned elsewhere. (He understandably kept a large Roma traffic sign, complete with a bullet hole, in his office as a souvenir.) ‘Alexander never gave orders not to take Rome,’ was Clark’s ex post facto rationalization, dripping with double negatives, special pleading and Anglophobia:
I know he was concerned about my maintaining my thrust to Valmontone, but hell when we were knocking on its door we had already destroyed as much of the German Tenth Army as we could ever have expected… One thing I knew was that I had to take Rome and that my American army was going to do it. So in all the circumstances I had to go for it before the British loused it up… We had earned it you understand.55
As a result of Clark’s orders on 26 May ‘to leave the 3rd Division and the Special Force to block Highway 6 and mount that assault… to the north as soon as you can’, the US 34th and 45th Divisions broke off their march to Valmontone and instead headed for Rome, covered by the 36th Division. Truscott was ‘dumbfounded’ and protested that ‘We should pour our maximum power into the Valmontone Gap to ensure the destruction of the retreating German army,’ but he was overruled.56 For the rest of his life he was convinced that, as he put it, ‘To be first in Rome was a poor compensation for this lost opportunity.’ Clark’s divisional commanders – especially Major-General Ernest N. Harmon of 1st US Armored Division and Brigadier John W. O’Daniel of 3rd Division – were equally angry about the change of plan, and Alexander himself was informed only after it had been made, when it was too late to countermand. Short of instantly replacing Clark with Truscott, there was little the commander of 15th Army Group could do, and he was reduced to asking Clark’s chief of staff, Major-General Alfred M. Gruenther, ‘I am sure the army commander will continue to push towards Valmontone, won’t he?’57 He would indeed, but not with anything like the force necessary to trap Vietinghoff, seven of whose divisions now managed to withdraw north-east of Rome.
Between the opening of Operation Diadem and the fall of Rome, 15th Army Group had