Friday, October 05

"The Day of Battle" - Rick Atkinson's Recounting of "Mistaken" Slog in Italy in WWII 

The ANNOTICO Report

 

The Allied Campaign for Italy in WWII was a tragic diversion from the main goal of striking at the heart of Germany, as Eisenhower and FDR wanted , but Churchill prevailed.

 

As a result, Italy paid a Terrible price in Lives , Property, and Misery, and  the Americans would absorb some of their Worst Drubbings of the war.  And the the Channel Crossing, that Churchill so abhorred occurred within 9 months.

 

A Terrible Slog

Wall Street Journal  

by Tom Nagorski
October 5, 2007

On Feb. 14, 1944, a remarkable scene unfolded near Monte Cairo, in southern Italy. A German courier bearing a white flag offered a truce to U.S. forces, a chance for both sides to collect their dead. The two armies had battered each other on various Italian fronts for seven months. The German courier's offer was accepted, the grim work begun. "There were bodies all over the hill and the odor was bad," a G.I. wrote in his diary.

But before long the troops were swapping cigarettes and family snapshots and "chattering about Italian girls and favorite movie stars." A German soldier offered a handshake to an American. "It is such a tragedy, this life," he said. Then it was back to battle and a battlefield as unforgiving as any in World War II.

The Italian campaign -- from the invasion of Sicily to the capture of Rome -- serves as canvas for Rick Atkinson's "The Day of Battle," the majestic sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning "An Army at Dawn," about the North African campaign of 1942-43. If "An Army at Dawn" was a generally spirit-lifting account of the Allied march across North Africa, "The Day of Battle" is the story of a terrible slog, a long and harsh affair that to this day provokes debate about whether it was worth waging at all.

By summer 1943 a tide had begun to turn in favor of the Allies, though, as Mr. Atkinson notes, "if the Allied powers . . . now possessed the strategic initiative, the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan still held the real estate." Operation Husky -- an amphibious invasion of Sicily -- was set in motion with the aim of taking back real estate and in the process diverting Axis manpower and matériel from northern Europe and the Soviet front. "Great possibilities are open in this theatre," Winston Churchill opined; the British believed that vanquishing Italy would "unhinge Rome and unbalance Berlin."

The Americans had their doubts. Wasn't Italy a sideshow, the real prizes being France and then Germany itself? Ultimately, Churchill's arguments won over Roosevelt and carried the day. On the morning of July 10, 1943, seven American and British divisions landed on two-dozen beaches in southeastern Sicily, beginning a push that would, in Mr. Atkinson's phrase, "reclaim for the Allied cause the first acreage in Europe since the war began."

Operation Husky went well -- and moved quickly -- and in early September the Allies attacked the mainland. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, believed that the time had come "to discontinue nibbling at islands and hit the Germans where it hurts."

From the start there was trouble. Allied power met fierce German resistance and a host of other enemies: malaria, venereal disease, confusion in the ranks, even occasional incidents of fratricide. There was inter-command bickering, too. "Tell Montgomery to stay out of my way," Gen. George Patton growled, referring to the British Gen. Bernard Montgomery, "or I'll drive the Krauts right up his ass." Winter in the mountains of southern Italy came early and hard, and the Germans built nearly impregnable defenses. Time and again, Allied momentum stalled, commanders' public brio notwithstanding. "The Germans are, in fact, in the very condition in which we want them," Montgomery declared on Nov. 20. "The road to Rome is open." As Mr. Atkinson notes dryly: "Alas, no."

In the months that followed, the Americans would absorb some of their worst drubbings of the war. Battle lines fogged, hills were seized and lost, and Allied casualties reached the tens of thousands. By February 1944 the two sides were, as the U.S. Gen. Mark W. Clark said, like "two boxers in the ring, both about to collapse." Doubts about the entire endeavor haunted London and Washington. Then the boxers were roused for one last round -- for the almost medieval, hand-to-hand battles at Monte Cassino that came to symbolize the bravery and misery of the entire campaign.

Cassino would stand for controversy, too, following the Allied bombing of the town's sixth-century abbey. Even an American general lamented the "needless destruction." Writes Mr. Atkinson: "War was whittling it all away: civility and moderation, youth and innocence, mountains and men."

This is not new ground for historians, but "The Day of Battle" covers it with distinction. Mr. Atkinson's achievement is to marry prodigious research with a superbly organized narrative and then to overlay the whole with writing as powerful and elegant as any great narrative of war. Along the way we get richly drawn portraits: Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who says of himself, "I'm anti-bluff, anti-faker, anti-coward, that's all"; Gen. Clark, the senior U.S. field commander, who was disliked by many and controversial in the end but of whom Eisenhower would say, "the best organizer, planner and trainer of troops that I have ever met"; and Montgomery, brilliant and arrogant, small of stature, resembling "a rather unsuccessful drygoods shopkeeper," as a Canadian reporter put it. "Do you know why I never have defeats?" Mr. Atkinson quotes Montgomery asking a Canadian unit, and answering: "My reputation as a great general means too much to me . . . you can't be a great general and have defeats."

And then, of course, there is Patton. It will come as no surprise that the general who believed that war "brings out all that is best" plays an oversize role in the narrative -- even if others figured more in the outcome. Patton is seen here timing his pulse as he comes ashore, "disgusted to find it slightly elevated." Moments later he hollers at some slow-footed soldiers: "Get your asses off the beach and go kill those Kraut bastards." Italy would also bring out the worst in Patton -- in one infamous incident he slapped two convalescing privates and berated them for cowardice. "For decades," notes Mr. Atkinson, "his name could hardly be uttered without conjuring not only his battlefield panache but also his reprehensible behavior."

But the most memorable players in "The Day of Battle" have lesser-known names -- G.I.s camped on hillsides, burrowed in trenches, men numbed by sleeplessness, deprivation and the seemingly endless carnage. "They're not young anymore," Theodore Roosevelt Jr. wrote of his soldiers. "They're not the fresh, smooth-cheeked boys you saw at a dance more than two years ago." Mr. Atkinson introduces dozens of these newly hard-bitten men -- among them a 25-year-old captain named Henry T. Waskow, of whom a classmate had said: "He was never young, not in a crazy high school-kid way."

Mr. Atkinson picks up Capt. Waskow's story along a ridge near San Pietro: "The Captain had a sudden craving for toast. 'When we get back to the States,' Waskow [said], 'I'm going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up.' Those were among his last mortal thoughts.... Machine guns cackled, mortars crumped, and Henry Waskow pitched over without a sound, mortally wounded by a shell fragment that tore open his chest. He had never been young, and he would never be old."

"The Day of Battle" requires stamina from the reader, though the challenge has much to do with the complex nature of the Italian campaign itself. At times one loses a sense of place -- are we at Point 579 or back at Cassino? -- but helpful maps dot the manuscript, and in any event such confusing moments are rare....

But these are minor matters. The reader's persistence will be richly rewarded at nearly every turn, with an understanding of the Italian theater and the valor of the men who fought there. Mr. Atkinson writes this account of the death of Lt. Col. Jack Toffey, struck on Highway 6 just outside Rome. "Veiled with a blanket, Toffey's mortal remains were laid on a stretcher and driven by jeep to the rear. Since landing on the beaches of Morocco 19 months earlier, he had fought as faithfully as any battle commander in the U.S. Army. Now his war was over, his battle spent. . . . One comrade wrote that 'there will never be his like again,' but that was incorrect: The country had produced enough of his ilk to finish the war Jack Toffey had helped win."

Indeed, the country had, though V-E Day was still 11 months away. The Allies were not finished. Neither is Rick Atkinson. "The Day of Battle" is volume two in his "Liberation Trilogy" of the war. Volume three -- the liberation of Europe -- is due in four years' time.

Mr. Nagorski is a senior producer at ABC News and author of "Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack."

 

The ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed (and are Archived) on:

Italia USA: http://www.ItaliaUSA.com [Formerly Italy at St Louis] (7 years)

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