ANZIO, BATTLE OF.

If good inter-Allied planning and operational clarity were the harbingers of victory in Normandy, then it is chilling to reflect that they were absent from the contemporary Allied effort in the Mediterranean. Anzio has since become a byword for the near-failure of a promising amphibious landing. At the time, the consequences for the Italian campaign were grave, but it should also be borne in mind that Operation Shingle, the plan to land the U.S. Sixth Army Corps from the sea at Anzio, was launched in January 1944, four and a-half months before Operation Overlord in Normandy, where failure was not an option for the Anglo-American force. In 1944 Anzio was a small fishing village on the western Italian coast thirty-five miles due south of Rome and sixty miles behind the fighting lines, which ranged west to east across the Italian alps, centered on Monte Cassino.

The campaign stemmed from the feeling that by winter 1943 the Allied campaign in Italy had fallen far short of expectations. Both Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark's U.S. Fifth Army on the west coast and General Bernard L. Montgomery's British Eighth Army in the east had been fought to a standstill on the Gustav Line, in difficult terrain and atrocious weather. In a landscape that was a gift to its defenders, their battle-hardened German opponents proved especially stubborn, led by energetic and able commanders. The Allied advance stalled along a range of hills that dominated the approach up the Liri Valley to Rome. Although by no means the tallest of the hills, Monte Cassino with its associated abbey proved the linchpin of the German defensive system; the cratered landscape and shattered dwellings added to the Axis advantage, proving impassable to Allied vehicles, and allowing only foot soldiers and mules. With no means of outflanking the German defenders, the Allies turned to frontal assault, little realizing that the nature and duration of the fighting would match the worst experiences of the World War I western front. It was to outflank the Cassino defenders by sea and (possibly) seize Rome that Shingle was devised.

Generals Mark Clark and Harold Alexander, the Allied Fifteenth Army Group commander, had earlier discussed seaborne assaults as a way of turning German defense lines (as Patton had tried on a smaller scale in Sicily the previous August), and Clark had established his own amphibious-operations planning staff. Sideshows of this nature were exhaustively championed by Winston Churchill to the irritation of his military advisors, but by mid-December 1943 the necessary landing craft were already earmarked for the Normandy invasion and a simultaneous landing in southern France (Operation Dragoon, eventually delayed to August 1944), so the operational aim of another Italian seaborne assault had to be clear and the case overwhelmingly convincing; this was neither.

The attack, launched by nearly four hundred ships and assault craft, was designed to stretch the defenders at Cassino by diverting much-needed reserves to block an invasion to their rear. When Major General John P. Lucas's Anglo-American Sixth Corps landed on 22 January 1944, it achieved complete surprise. The British First Division landed unopposed northwest of Anzio, the U.S. Third Division at Nettuno, to the east, and Anzio with its handy deep-water port was taken by U.S. Rangers. Within forty-eight hours Lucas had secured a beachhead seven miles deep, yet he was unsure what to do with his success. Clark's orders were to secure the beachhead, then advance to the Alban Hills—visible in the distance from the port—beyond which beckoned Rome, just thirty-five miles distant. Recalling the bloody landings at Salerno in September 1943, Clark warned Lucas privately not to stick his neck out and overextend his forces.

Alas for him, Lucas faced Albert Kesselring, a Luftwaffe field marshal with an unusually sure hand at land warfare, who did not oblige by pulling men back from Cassino as hoped but ordered his Fourteenth Army (under General von Mackensen) to counterattack with shock and speed. By the end of January, Mackensen had four divisions, a tank regiment, and two hundred guns in the area while the Luftwaffe achieved air parity, bombing every night. The flat open terrain beyond Anzio became the scene of vicious fighting, with every yard of the ground disputed and covered by German artillery. Both sides used dried river beds as makeshift trenches in what became a brief rerun of the World War I western front. Forewarned by intelligence from the British Ultra project just beforehand, a series of German attacks culminated in a near breakthrough, but by early April it was clear that fighting had reached an attritional stalemate. On 22 February Clark (at Alexander's urging) replaced Lucas with his deputy Truscott, Alexander describing the former Sixth Corps commander as "a broken reed" following a visit to the bridgehead.

Churchill was particularly critical, stating, "I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat on the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale." Instead of Anzio supporting the Cassino front, the Allies had to launch Operation Diadem (the fourth battle of Cassino in five months) on 11 May 1944 to rescue Anzio. The crushing land offensive of over a dozen divisions shattered the Gustav Line around Cassino, and as the Germans withdrew slowly northward via the Hitler Line, up the Liri Valley and Highway 6 to Rome, the Anzio force was able to seize its moment and break out.

Though specifically ordered to leave Rome alone, Clark entered the Eternal City, diverting forces that would have otherwise cut off the Anzio and Cassino defenders at Valmontone and brought about a swifter end to the Italian campaign. Clark, however, knew that Overlord was about to commence and wanted his moment of glory. He succeeded by making front-page news as the liberator of Rome on 5 June 1944, but D-day in Normandy eclipsed the Italian campaign thereafter. Later, a German military historian wrote that when the breakout from Anzio occurred in May 1944 it was felt that only a miracle would prevent another Stalingrad south of Rome and "General Clark provided that miracle."

The lost opportunities of Anzio aroused controversy that reverberates to this day. In Lucas, Clark clearly chose the wrong man for Anzio: He was not an inspiring commander when one was needed. Lucas had the opportunity to follow his own judgment but was faced with an impossible choice. Had he pushed on for Rome as intended, Kesselring would surely have crushed his slender force. Perhaps only Patton would have been rash enough to try and lucky enough to have succeeded. Yet Lucas's decision to stay and consolidate his position betrayed a timidity that Churchill, Alexander, and others vilified. Nevertheless, in his defense, Lucas had enough men at the bridgehead to prevent it from falling to the series of brutal German counterattacks.

With the operational aims far from clear, Shingle was surely mistimed. No senior commander emerges from Anzio with credit. Clark's decision to head for Rome rather than Valmontone is (to put it lightly) highly questionable. His superior, the patrician Alexander, was never one to give firm orders; he preferred to offer advice in a gentlemanly fashion, and his lack of grip may have contributed to the debacle. This gamble, that promised much but was probably never going to deliver, cost the Allies seven thousand killed and thirty-six thousand wounded, as well as forty-four thousand sick in the malaria-ridden water courses. Kesselring, who fought on for another eleven months, estimated German losses at forty thousand, including five thousand killed and 4,500 captured.

See alsoD-Day; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blumenson, Martin. Anzio: The Gamble That Failed. Philadelphia, 1963.

——. United States Army in World War II: The Mediterranean Theater of Operations. Vol. 3: Salerno to Cassino. Washington, D.C., 1969.

D'Este, Carlo. Fatal Decision: Anzio and the Battle for Rome. London, 1991.

Molony, C. J. C. The Mediterranean and Middle East. Vol. 5: The Campaign in Sicily, 1943, and the Campaign in Italy, 3rd September 1943 to 31st March 1944. London, 1973. Vol. 6: Victory in the Mediterranean, Part 1: 1st April–4th June 1944. London, 1984.

Trevelyan, Raleigh. The Fortress: A Diary of Anzio and After. London, 1956.

Zaloga, Steven J. Anzio 1944: The Beleaguered Beachhead. Oxford, U.K., 2005.

Peter Caddick-Adams