Beached Wildcat
Tuts book will make bitter reading for anyone who fought at Anzio, especially during the bloody period of attack and counter-attack in February, 1944. Mr. Vaughan-Thomas's conclu- sion is that the beachhead did in the end pay off; it provided invaluable lessons for the Normandy landings and it played an important part when Alexander fought his way north through the Gustav line in May. Quite so—but at what a price, as Mr. Vaughan-Thomas points out.
To a private soldier, an NCO or junior officer at the front line, 'higher policy' is something utterly remote and .unfathomable. One may be jerked , from hell-hole to hell-hole, watch one's friends die or be horrifyingly maimed by the dozen, suffer miserable weather conditions, be goaded into patrols or attacks across minefields against an enemy who seems to possess every advantage, and yet, in spite of everything, one still assumes—has to assume—that the people at the top, the very top, know what they are doing and at least have some sort of unity of purpose.
Well, the purpose originally behind the Anzio' landing on January 22 was to break the deadlock in Italy. The idea was Churchill's own; it was designed as a piece of daring, a 'cat's claw,' a risk certainly but nevertheless a flamboyant gesture that could conceivably have meant the capture of Rome and the cutting off of the Ger- man army from the rear by seizing the Alban Hills. The Allies landed, to find that they had taken the enemy totally by surprise. The way to Rome and the Alban Hills was wide open. But instead of advancing, they• waited,- creeping forward no more than a mere seven miles along the Anzio-Albano road, not even touching Route Seven, one of the main highways to Cassino and the south, The Germans gathered, launched attack after attack, decimating battalions like the 6th Gordons, 1st Irish Guards and 2nd Sherwood Foresters, reaching the very last-ditch defences of the beachhead, until incredibly they were halted, mainly through the crushing weight of the Allied bombardments. There followed three months of trench warfare of the All Quiet on the Western Front variety, unparalleled elsewhere during the Second World War. •
What went wrong? First:
The adventure was launched under divided counsels and against the inner conviction of one of the partners. The men in Britain who were responsible for the higher conduct of the war believed in Anzio; their American colleagues did not. When Allies disagree, they have te compromise, but compromise never won s battle yet. No wonder that the general selected to lead the troops into battle muttered as he left the final conference, 'This is going to be worse than Gallipoli!'
In other words the Americans, who held the purse-strings, allowed Churchill, as though he were a brilliant child who wanted a toy and had to be humoured enough LCTs to carry the absurdly inadequate force ot two divisions. A question, therefore, that any surviving com- batant from Anzio is entitled to ask, is whether in the first place Churchill was justified in taking such a risk. But there is another question, even more serious: why didn't the Americans, having grudgingly agreed to the plan, put their backs into the show instead of allowing Anzio to re- main a gamble, and a pretty dubious one.
Second, we have General Lucas, the American put in charge of the landing by General Mark Clark—excessively cautious, with no heart in the venture, distrusted by his British subordinates.' In Mr. Vaughan-Thomas's opinion, Lucas went ashore determined not to advance to the Alban Hills and he never communicated this to the British. It can be understood that he felt pessimistic about the smallness of the striking force allotted to him, but how much anguish could have been spared at Anzio if at least he had dared to take Campoleone and Cisterna the first day. He could easily, too, have risked sending patrols into the hills, which would have confused the enemy and might have affected Kesselring'3 decision to hold firm on the Gustav line. No wonder Churchill said : 'I had hoped that we were hurling a wild cat on to the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale.' When, to everyone's relief, Lucas was at last relieved bY Truscott, a general of immensely, different calibre, the damage was done; thousands of British and American troops had been slaughtered.
About General Mark Clark, Mr. Vaughawl Thomas is kind, kinder than, say, Fred Majdalany would have been. If Anzio wit.t Churchill's `baby,', then why was it not made ad. all-British venture? Because it 'had to be launched from .a Fifth,Army base and was there-, foie a Fifth Army responsibility.' Because, one suspects, Clark's vanity was such that he could not bear to miss any opportunity, however slight, of his Fifth Army being the first to have. `the honour of capturing Rome,' with himself at it victorious head. Mr. Vaughan-Thomas says;4 The Higher Command had given him a job f?,.; do and, as a soldier, he had accepted it.' Bur there was more to it than that.
The evidence is sickening. Mr. Vaughan' Thomas, who was BBC war correspondent froin the landing to the breakout on May 23, is in specially .favoured position to tell the story and has worked hard to present a fair and exact picture, even if he has not quite the vividlY imaginative gifts of Majdalany, especially when dealing with life at the platoon-level stratum. may be that he has concentrated too hard on the disentangling of the necessarily confusing and complex • to-ing and fro-ing of divisions , and battalions during the February holocaust. He Is inclined, too, to underplay the murderous con' ditions and state of low morale in the front line • wadis from March onwards. Nevertheless he has written a book that deserves success and on 3 subject with implications transcending the purely' localised interest of those who emerged alive from Anzio or who lost friends and relativei
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