That evening, 23 March, the British general, Sir Harold Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of Allied Armies in Italy (AAI), drove up to the front line to see the battlefield for himself. The New Zealand commander, General Freyberg, and the US Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark, had both recommended that the Third Battle of Cassino be called off without delay. Agreeing that any further offensive action was indeed futile, Alexander concurred. The Germans had scored another defensive victory. Difficult though it was to accept in this age of highly mechanised modern warfare, the harsh winter conditions and formidable natural defences of this thin, mountainous country had ensured that the Allies would henceforth have to return to the old summer campaigning season of centuries past.
Curiously though, along theAnzio bridgehead, thirty miles to the northwest, the German Supreme Commander South-West, Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring, was drawing much the same conclusion as his opposite number as he drove along the front and talked with his commanders. It was now two months since the Allies had made their landing at Anzio in Operation SHINGLE. On 22 January, 36,000 American and British troops under the command of US VI Corps had come ashore on the flat land thirty miles south of Rome. Although intended as a means of outflanking the main front along the Gustav Line to the south-east, the shortage of available shipping had ensured that not enough men and equipment had been landed quickly enough to take early advantage of the surprise that had been achieved. The initiative was quickly lost as German troops were hurriedly sent to counterattack, and Allied hopes of forging a link to their forces further south were subsequently dashed.
Anzio, however, had proved equally frustrating for the Germans who had recognised the importance, both psychologically and strategically, of forcing the Allies back into the sea. Generaloberst Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the German AOK (Armeeoberkommando) 14, whose area of operations included both Rome and the Anzio bridgehead, had for some weeks been suggesting to Kesselring that they should give up any hopes of such a goal. Repeated German counterattacks had been forced back, blunted by the Allies’ superior fire power. Indeed, the night before, as Carla Capponi had lain with Paolo in their hide-out in Rome, they had heard the distant muffled thunder of the guns along the Anzio bridgehead to the south.
The Allies may have managed to cling on to their small gains, but for the American and British troops trapped there, the Anzio bridgehead had proved a hellish place, with the men enduring conditions akin to those of the Western Front in the previous war. The landscape all along the front was now witness to a terrible desolation. Villages and towns lay utterly flattened. Areas of thick pine forest stood splintered and shorn. The earth was pockmarked by shell crater after shell crater; the soil churned into thick, glutinous mud by the sheer scale of exploding ordnance and labouring Allied vehicles. As Ray Saidel – a nineteen-year-old private with the US 1st Armored Regiment – had discovered, artillery dominated every aspect of their lives. His friends and comrades around him all shared the same look: deep-set hollow eyes from lack of sleep, and the ‘Anzio Crouch’ – the way they walked so as to be ready to throw themselves flat on the ground the moment a shell whistled nearby.
For the troops trapped in the Anzio enclave, there were two ways of existing and both were underground. The first was in large dugouts each holding about five men, where there was plenty of company but only a comparatively thin roof because the hole was too wide to support anything heavy. The second option was to dig a tiny foxhole about six-feet long, like a coffin, but with an entrance at an angle at one end. Ray liked his buddies well enough but he also wanted to stay alive, so he opted for the one-man foxhole, dug beside a felled pine tree. He covered it with branches and wood and mud, and discovered that at the end of every night’s shelling, as more and more branches and debris landed on top, his roof became thicker and thicker, and therefore more secure.
However, although he felt safe enough in there, at just three feet deep it was hardly comfortable; any lower and the water level would have flooded the floor. He could just about lie there and read a book by the light of a small candle dug into the side. Sharing this miserable shelter was a stray puppy. The dog had become something of a lucky mascot as it could hear approaching shells coming long before Ray and his comrades could, and would immediately take cover.
By day, Ray would travel by jeep down the notorious ‘Bowling Alley’, a long, highly exposed and extremely hazardous disused railway line that led to the forward area. There, in a sunken road, were five tanks from his own Company G, hunkered down amongst the infantry. Ray’s task was to take messages from the tanks to an observation post in a small, squat, one-storey shell of a building on the junction of the Bowling Alley and the sunken road. Message carrying was an extremely dangerous occupation, as any movement would attract German fire. There was never any room left in the GIs’ foxholes along the sunken road, and so, in between running errands, Ray and his colleagues would take whatever cover they could between the tanks and the dirt bank. As he was well aware, Anzio was an easy place to get yourself killed.
The one consolation was that the Allies were firing greater amounts of ordnance at the Germans than the Germans were firing at them, and it was for this reason that, as the partisans’ bomb shattered the spring calm in Rome, Feldmarschall Kesselring agreed to call a halt to any further offensive action along the Anzio front.
So it was that on that March day, a renewed stalemate developed along the two fronts. The Germans had achieved a victory of sorts during the third battle at Cassino; the Allies at Anzio. For Ray Saidel and Hans-Jürgen Kumberg, and for the many thousands of other troops opposing one another, this merely meant a lessening in the intensity of the fighting. They still had to keep their wits about them and do their best to make sure they survived this war of attrition. And that meant concentrating on what was happening immediately around them. Their war was one being fought on a very narrow front; and the lives of innocent men – whether Italian or German – far away in distant Rome were of no concern to them at all.
It was, however, of great concern to Feldmarschall Kesselring as he arrived back at his headquarters north of the capital at around seven o’clock that evening. The terror attack at the Via Rasella that afternoon had caused fury and outrage among the German occupiers. It had also given an ugly foretaste of the menace the guerrillas would present from that day until the end of the war. Miraculously, not only had Carla and Paolo safely escaped, so too had the other eleven Gappists involved in the Via Rasella attack. The SS troops had suffered 60 per cent casualties. Twenty-eight had been killed immediately in the initial attack and during the following day that figure would rise to thirty-three. As an effective unit, the 11th Company of the 3rd Battalion SS Police Regiment Bozen had ceased to exist. Two civilians, a middle-aged man and a thirteen-year-old boy, had also been killed. The street itself was now wrecked by a massive thirty-foot crater and littered with debris.
The German response was swift. Moreover, the conversations that followed between Rome, Germany, and the German command in Italy late that afternoon and evening of 23 March were to have far-reaching consequences for the remaining fourteen months of the war in Italy.
It was General Kurt Mälzer, the German Commandant of Rome, who had first informed German Supreme Command South-West (SW) of the attack, even though the SS troops had been policemen and therefore came under the direct command and jurisdiction of General Karl Wolff, the senior SS officer in Italy. Since Kesselring and his Chief of Staff, General Siegfried Westphal, were still not back from the Anzio front at this time, Mälzer had spoken to a staff officer at Supreme Command SW, Oberst Dietrich Beerlitz. He had then informed the German High Command in Berlin, the OKW, who in turn informed Hitler.
The Führer had been spending the day quietly at the Wolfsschanze (‘Wolf ’s Lair’) – his underground bunker complex near Rastenburg in East Prussia – when he was interrupted with the news soon after the attack had taken place. He flew into a rage and demanded the kind of retribution that would ‘make the world tremble’. He would, he vowed, destroy an entire quarter of Rome with everyone in it; a moment later he demanded the shooting of at least thirty Italians for every German killed. During the same rant this figure rose to fifty Italians to be shot for every slain SS man.
Hitler’s reaction reached Beerlitz before Kesselring